Youtubes revenue is not its profit. It has significant expenses in terms of paying creators, hosting and bandwidth costs and the cost of all the engineers it takes to run the systems.
In addition you do not factor in significant complexities like the ones below:
You are incorrect about your assumptions in many respects. Let me list out a few:
1) There is a big difference between watching a 15 min video at 2X for fun vs watching 8 hours of videos a day while having to follow laid down policy with complexity. Videos are not taken down only for one reason and there is a lot of complexity involved with edge cases. Humans are not robots and this is not a task we are inherently good at. Give it a shot yourself for a day and see how easy it is.
2) Your overhead does not consider any additional complexity in terms of languages, specialty, regional expertise etc. This is not a simple problem either. Sure maybe you can hire 1000 reviewers in lets say Indonesia but you cannot find a native Kswahili speaker there. Its not cheap to setup an office for 2 people in Kenya. Scale this to the world which has 193 countries and 6,500 languages.
3) People dont work without any management overhead. You need frontline reviewers. Then you need a layer of experts above them. The you need managers to take care of the operations. The managers to manage those managers. Then recruiters to hire those people. Then HR to deal with their issues.
4) Turnover is a big deal. Very few people in the world can watch beheadings 40 hours a week. An even smaller proportion can handle child safety material. What happens when those people need to take time off? You need additional people. If you want a humane operation then you might have to get them to work only 2 hours a day.
It continues to amaze me how some of the smartest and technically savvy people on HN either do not recognize or refuse to admit how complicated a problem planet scale moderation is. If it was a problem that could be solved by spending a few tens of million dollars a year, it would have been solved.
In addition you do not factor in significant complexities like the ones below:
You are incorrect about your assumptions in many respects. Let me list out a few:
1) There is a big difference between watching a 15 min video at 2X for fun vs watching 8 hours of videos a day while having to follow laid down policy with complexity. Videos are not taken down only for one reason and there is a lot of complexity involved with edge cases. Humans are not robots and this is not a task we are inherently good at. Give it a shot yourself for a day and see how easy it is.
2) Your overhead does not consider any additional complexity in terms of languages, specialty, regional expertise etc. This is not a simple problem either. Sure maybe you can hire 1000 reviewers in lets say Indonesia but you cannot find a native Kswahili speaker there. Its not cheap to setup an office for 2 people in Kenya. Scale this to the world which has 193 countries and 6,500 languages.
3) People dont work without any management overhead. You need frontline reviewers. Then you need a layer of experts above them. The you need managers to take care of the operations. The managers to manage those managers. Then recruiters to hire those people. Then HR to deal with their issues.
4) Turnover is a big deal. Very few people in the world can watch beheadings 40 hours a week. An even smaller proportion can handle child safety material. What happens when those people need to take time off? You need additional people. If you want a humane operation then you might have to get them to work only 2 hours a day.
Here is some more reading if you are interested in understanding this from the moderators / reviewers view: https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/16/21021005/google-youtube-...
It continues to amaze me how some of the smartest and technically savvy people on HN either do not recognize or refuse to admit how complicated a problem planet scale moderation is. If it was a problem that could be solved by spending a few tens of million dollars a year, it would have been solved.