this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2023
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I do not believe that is the case. Youtube ads are an insanely profitable business. I suspect throwing a couple dozen of FTEs on blocking ad blockers would be <1% of current revenue.
I don't doubt they make tonnes of revenue from ads however you have to remember how small the share of adblocker users are. So the extra money from fighting the adblock user base is a clear gamble. Especially as those types of users are the ones who are more likely to avoid YouTube completely if they can't bypass ads.
Someone in Google would have done the research because it's not a simple case of
war profit = adblockusers * ad revenue per userI strongly believe they'll stop once they hit a certain threshold/target of "reduction of adblock users". They won't go on like this forever.
To be fair, at the current monopolistic state of YouTube, how many people are actually likely to avoid YouTube completely?
If YouTube truly succeeded in forcing 90 seconds of unavoidable ads with no exceptions without paying $20/month then I genuinely think YouTube won't be a monopoly for very long.
Honestly I've tinkerd with the idea of making a genuine ad free YouTube competition. But the industry standard is operating at a loss. No one wants to pay for a YouTube service and no one wants to watch ads. If anyone has any ideas on how a YouTube competitor could stay afloat I'm all ears.
Oh I don't expect it to be free and ad free. Just not as invasive as it is now, the ads are relentless especially when the form factor of videos are usually proportionally quite short.
Alternatively have a reasonable price for add free. Google is an enormous company which operate as a loss for monopoly and exposure reasons, they've put themselves into this position
How can a competitor handle Google dropping ads and/or pricing and run at a loss until the competitor is bought or destroyed outright? Google has too much money and existing infrastructure for someone other than say Amazon to compete with YouTube and god help us if that’s the alternative we get.
How can a new competitor acquire content creators to actually threaten the monopoly? Genuine question.
They can't. Unless YouTube fucks up big time, nothing will touch it, especially since they are the most "generous" with their payouts to creators. Only if someone steps up with a platform just as good as YouTube (UI, infrastructure) AND pays a bigger share, maybe it will happen. But video streaming is a thankless business so I personally doubt it will happen anytime soon.
Don't forget they want to introduce things like WEI to lock down what devices and plugins you can even use on your own computer. That's what Google stands for.