The idea that "stealing" from google is somehow morally wrong is hilarious to me. Nobody owes them anything if they cant afford to host youtube then first of all its odd that its been around for so many years in the state it has, and second of all, if they cant afford to host it that their problem. Not mine.
The money can also vary a lot depending on what advertisers are trying to advertise on your account. Dan Olsen talks about there being a minor bidding war for his Line Goes Up video because it was attracting crypto advertisers during a frenzy so they were bidding up placement on anything related to crypto.
The money isn't great by itself but it's still money coming in too.
This isn’t the right analogy. It’s more like someone opens up a shop where you can walk to the counter and ask for some food, and they stick a sample of some product in the bag when they give you the food. It’s not immoral to throw away the sample if you don’t want it, just like it’s not immoral to not play back the ad you get served along side a video you request if you don’t want to watch it.
If you made a robot that automatically goes there and takes the food and throws away all the samples I bet they would stop serving that robot very quickly.
Copying/sharing media is not the same as stealing from a store. We already had this debate like 30 years ago - "You wouldn't download a car!" Unless you really believe that borrowing a book from a friend deprives the author of a sale and that that's equivalent to pickpocketing $10 from the author.
Google has every right to restrict who gets to access their services (although antitrust concerns do come up) and every user has the right to control the software on their devices.
> Copying/sharing media is not the same as stealing from a store
This is different, you aren't copying youtube videos and sending them to a friend using your own resources, you are using their server capacity to watch it yourself.
So you are costing Youtube money just like stealing from a store costs the store money. So the old "copying is not theft" argument doesn't hold here. It does work for torrenting etc, but not when you stream directly from their servers.
Sure but the post I was responding to starts with "Would you use the same justification for pirating movies? Or for stealing from large supermarkets?", that's what I was responding to. Also in this context the situation is amusing to me given that YouTube's early success was built on pirated content. That continued for a long time even after Google's acquisition.
With respect to server/network resources, like I said Google is free to restrict access as they see fit.
> the post I was responding to starts with "Would you use the same justification for pirating movies? Or for stealing from large supermarkets?", that's what I was responding to
The post you responded to didn't say that those two were the same, it clearly shows those two as different levels of bad if you read the next line:
> "Not a pointed question, I just find it genuinely interesting where people draw the line."
So your point here is just you not understanding and reacting with a meme since his post sounded a bit similar to an argument you have seen before.
I take issue with equating the three actions of not viewing ads, piracy and shoplifting although, I am absolutely 100% alright with all three for different reasons.
Not viewing ads is a lot more like not looking at billboards on the highway or not reading the inserts you get in your free local newspaper.
Pirating movies is a method of showing disdain for extractive and manipulative IP law that lines the pockets of nasty old rich fuds while not paying the actual artists that made a work. I would not pirate an indie film for instance.
Stealing from large supermarkets is basically just preventing them from throwing the unsold food away at the end of the profit cycle. Again the only person youre stealing from is the ruling class who profit off of hunger and poverty.
It's HN. People's time and effort are not valued unless it's to make rust compiler run on gameboy.
Remember the whole "news" part of HN works because people are allowed to link to "unpaywalled" version of paywalled content. It's what HN is about -- stealing premium content. If these kinds of links are banned HN will lose a lot of traffic.
You’re also stealing from the content creators who rev share with Google. No one seems to mention that a majority of the ad revenue Google gives to content creators. If you makes you feel better, you can keep thinking it’s Google.
No one is stealing a damn thing. We're not obligated to watch ads. Our attention is not currency to pay for services with. If anyone's stealing anything, it's them. As far as I'm concerned uBlock Origin is legitimate self-defense against their ceaseless attempts to grab my attention without my consent.
They send people videos for free. They do so hoping you'll watch the ads. At exactly no point does this ever turn into an obligation to "pay" by watching the ads. They only have themselves to blame if their business model isn't working out.
It is not my responsibility to make sure people can make money off of me by means of "implied contracts" and other similar bullshittery. It is those people's choice to make those videos, and it's their choice of which platform they publish them on. But then it's MY choice of how I use the internet on a device I own.
Exactly. Which is why I feel no sympathy for the entitled complainers when google says enough and blocks the ad-blockers. As somebody that makes videos and makes a decent amount of money from it, I could care less about people that are so adamantly demanding free content getting cut off by Google. These people clearly don’t care about paying the subscription Google offers if they want to avoid ads, they clearly don’t want to watch ads to even support the creator, why would I care about having these people watch my videos?
It’s especially funny to see this sentiment on hacker news. “Those stupid content creators, clearly if they want to make money, just don’t use YT!”. I’m curious, what’s the alternative? Cable? Good luck. Udemy? What if I’m trying to make entertainment videos? Oh, I guess I could just build my own low latency highly efficient video hosting site and get a paid subscriber base that manages to cover hosting costs and make a profit! Yea, because that’s completely realistic…
The alternative? A job. Don't make vlogging your entire full-time occupation. That simple.
If you do want to make videos that reliably earn you money, charge money for them! Make it explicit. Don't rely on implied contracts that other people may or may not honor at their discretion.
Doing any of those things without the algorithm showing your videos to people is hard though. They also require 3k watch hours in the past year so they expect you to grind for at least a year to "prove" you are worth monetizing.
That or go viral somehow and bootstrap yourself (which is likely why the shorts views are so high). Obvious not impossible as people still do it but the math seems suspect to me.
YouTube gets thousands of hours of video uploaded every second. I'm not sure what the ratio of monetized accounts to non-monetized accounts is, but if YouTube can run a channel "for free" for a year because they aren't monetizing it yet, it seems there's a threshold they are willing to accept to serve videos "nobody wants to see" until enough people do want to see it and they advertise on it.
So the high profile creators are costing YouTube money to serve their videos and YouTube wants help paying that cost. But they only extract it from channels they know are profitable because there are a lot of eyeballs on those videos.
Almost like they are promising X ad views to advertisers and want to keep that numbers game rolling. I feel like ad based spending is going to go through a correction in the next decade.
> They also require 3k watch hours in the past year so they expect you to grind for at least a year to "prove" you are worth monetizing.
No, if you get 3k watch hours on a video you are good to go, you don't have to wait a year. I've seen plenty of channels get monetized within weeks since they already had an audience.
I remember when Game Grumps made "The Grumps" channel and before they even uploaded a single video to it, they were already at Diamond(I believe) subscriber count. I don't remember if they were immediately monetized or not, though.
There are other places you can post to jumpstart your channel like Reddit or social media you're only reliant on the grace of YT if you allow yourself to be. There's also still plenty of niche blogs/news sites that can send plenty of audience to your new channel if you're producing good content. You're also misreading the hours metric it's just a rolling window not a wait period. If you hit those metrics in a week you can monetize basically immediately.
Is it that expensive these days? Specifically, Cloudflare R2 has free egress, so you pay a fraction of what you'd pay most other places for the underlying "serve video" part of a platform.
The Cloudflare TOS does not allow you to serve video from a Cloudflare address unless you’re using a Cloudflare product that is meant for video. So no, you can't make a youtube clone and make Cloudflare pay that bill for you.
Cloudflare makes their money by making users overpay for other things than egress. Video hosting is one of the exceptions where they can't make up that on other costs which is why they have another service for it.
Nobody is taking the weird of one message posted in a medium as non-discoverable as Discord as enough legal stability to build a YouTube competitor on.
