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). ⬆