Bonum Certa Men Certa

Why You Should Quit YouTube - Part 4: Financial Crunch Time

Series parts:

  1. New Series: Why People Everywhere Should Quit YouTube
  2. YouTube's New Management: Time's Up, Start Paying and Watch Ads, Don't Use Free Software
  3. previous part
  4. YOU ARE HERE ☞ Financial Crunch Time


Video download link | md5sum ec8f604ca4242f2ee20fd17b29192f49 YouTube Wants Nothing But Money Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0



Summary: Google's greed is destroying YouTube and there's no more free hosting; now they strive to bombard people with many long ads and the ad revenue is for Google to collect, not the people who do all the actual creative work and invest in equipment like expensive cameras, microphones, video editors etc.

THE previous part discussed the likely dire state of YouTube's accounting (under Google or "Alphabet"; it has become fashionable to make umbrella 'shells' such as "Meta"). If YouTube was still an independent company, it would be deep in debt, just like Twitter and other fake "successful" companies (Spotify, from Sweden, is losing a billion dollars a year). A lot of video or multimedia (including music) hosting platforms are financially untenable. The video explains the example of Vimeo and others. Remember Microsoft's "Soapbox"? It didn't last long, did it?



So Google's lawyers have now decided to nakedly take aim at Invidious. Is that a smart move? What percent of all YouTube traffic goes through Invidious instances? Certainly far less than 1%!

"The new chief of YouTube clearly has no idea what he's doing; he's just a greedy salesperson, aiming for nothing other than MONEY MONEY MONEY NOW NOW NOW!"As Ryan put it this morning: "You might mention that I use NewPipe because of all of YouTube's ads and restrictions and that Google harasses them with lawyers and technical sabotage. Which is petty considering iPhones can't even install it and only about 0.1% of Android users are smart enough. How much revenue could NewPipe even be costing them if most phones don't allow it to be installed and Google won't allow it in the Play Store?"

And "there's also FreeTube, mpv and yt-dlp," MinceR reminded Ryan.

The matter of fact is, Google (or the alphabet agency it pretends to be under) made a huge mistake that would certainly alienate many people and alter perceptions for the worse. The new chief of YouTube clearly has no idea what he's doing; he's just a greedy salesperson, aiming for nothing other than MONEY MONEY MONEY NOW NOW NOW! His predecessor is one of the earliest employees of Google, back then the "don't be evil" company.

Whatever happens next, it won't be pretty. Google will drive into a wall and then blame the wall, not the driver or the car. The financial prospects of YouTube will continue to diminish and, as we shall explain in future parts, people will leave. Creators and audiences won't put up with disgusting ads that can neither be skipped nor avoided the "afk" way.

A lot of the 'beef' of the series starts in Part 5. A lot of these self-harming moves from Google, however, appear to stem from financial/business failure. Building a large platform or even a monopoly on a mountain of losses/debt isn't too hard; is there a turnaround? GitHub, for example, already had two major rounds of layoffs this year. Just hosting something for a lot of people isn't the same as sustainability, not even when your engineers are based in India (Microsoft fired them too).

Recent Techrights' Posts

Ensuring That Every Computer User Anywhere in the World Can Take Control of All His or Her Computers
We must fight the people who attack general-purpose computing, in particular those who push this agenda very aggressively inside Linux
What Happened to the Open Source Initiative (OSI) Elections: The Purge, the Cover-up, and the Witch-hunts
OSI has gone "full Microsoft"
 
Gemini Links 28/04/2025: Autism and Structural Navigation
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, April 27, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, April 27, 2025
In 24 Countries Observed by statCounter Vista 11 is Still Less Than a Quarter of Windows Users Despite All Other Versions Being 'Expired'
They ought to move to GNU/Linux
Links 27/04/2025: Pope Goodbyes, "Politics of Fear", Slop Redux and More Google Shutdowns (Google Debt Had Grown This Year)
Links for the day
Links 27/04/2025: Serenity Dialectics, Hockey Jersey Ethics, and More
Links for the day
Links 27/04/2025: Death of Nest Thermostats, Death of Metaverse
Links for the day
Links 27/04/2025: Projects Workflow and Discovering Technology
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, April 26, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, April 26, 2025
Microsoft Isn't on the Map in USSR
To them, it's either Google or Yandex
In Central America Windows Became a Small Force
These are countries where Windows used to have well over 95% of the "market"
What's Very Vexing to GAFAM, EPO and Others Is That It's Incredibly Hard to Censor Us (and Nobody Ever Successfully Did That Before)
resist, do not capitulate
Site May be Even Faster Now
It basically takes less than a tenth of a second to serve the page
Receiving SLAPPs and Collecting Them Like Trophies (the SLAPPs Always Fail)
People who file lawsuits bring even more attention to themselves (or to embarrassing statements about them)
Year of GNU/Linux on the Laptop?
It's not happening only in Lenovo
What People Must Understand About the Open Source Initiative (OSI)
some facts about the Open Source Initiative (OSI)
Many of the Scandals Are Interconnected (Overlapping People and Corporations)
We're only getting started
More Copyright Lawsuits Against LLM Slop Providers and Suppliers of LLM Slopfarms Would Benefit Society
It's not just bad for the Web and for society; it's also legally dangerous
Links 26/04/2025: General Assassinated in the Town of Balashikha, US Promoting Seafloor Mining
Links for the day
Links 26/04/2025: Facebook Layoffs Again, Remembering What's Real, and Say No to Mass Surveillance
Links for the day
Links 26/04/2025: NOAA Budget Cuts and "Dog Days Ahead"
Links for the day
In defence of JD Vance, death of Pope Francis
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Three Years in Prison for Disney Employee’s ‘Menu Hacking’: The Economic Fallout of Digital Menus
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, April 25, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, April 25, 2025