Hold onto it and talk about it at parties?
If someone else has the main video site on the internet, that is a beachhead for building a larger platform and challenging Google as a whole.
Hahaha… to own them we’d have to pay for them
We’re already fucking paying for them! I’ve made this point twice now.
My brother
I’m out of patience
of Google, not Youtube
That’s my whole point! Google can afford it. Even if YouTube showed zero ads and earned zero revenue Google could afford it.
If I want to support a small creator, I donate. I don’t feel bad about hurting the bottom line of one of the highest-earning companies in the world.
Even if YouTube runs at a deficit, it’s probably worthwhile for Google to control the main video hosting hub on the internet and keep competition out of the game.
So does shipping, etc.
Spending on shipping or manufacturing is a lot less discretionary than spending on advertising. You have broad leeway to advertise less or more, and past a certain point the main requirement is that you advertise as well as your competition. If Google shows fewer ads across the board, even half as many ads, you’re still in business.
What is your proposed alternative?
If you want to talk real life, they’re already raking in $60 billion a year in profit so I see no need for an alternative. If you want to talk hypotheticals, I think central back-end infrastructure like Google’s servers — and the data we put on them — should be publicly owned, with an open-source marketplace of front-end services we can use to access it. We should be able to browse YouTube with whatever site interfaces and suggestion algorithms we find most useful, not the ones most profitable to Google.
Blackrock owns 5% of Tesla
Blackrock’s clients own 5% of Tesla.
Blackrock dies tomorrow if they do anything other than what their clients expect of them. The sole purpose of Blackrock is to invest rich people’s money and maximize returns for them while managing risk. They have some leeway in how they do this, but only up to a point. They’re very good at what they do but they are ultimately replaceable.
Also, when I said “they own the entire fucking planet” in my original unedited comment — which I edited for tone before I saw your near-immediate response — I was referring both google and the companies that advertise through google, which is why I said “they all make enough money already.” All is plural. Google sells enough ads, and their client companies buy enough ads.
Also, Blackrock is an asset management company that handles other people’s money. Google earns 16 times more revenue than them.
I gave you both revenue and profit. Their revenue was $280 billion, not $73 billion. $73 billion was their profit before tax, and $60 billion was profit after tax. $13 billion, the difference, was their income tax.
they took $470 million in losses
According to the Credit Suisse report, which also massively contradicted Google’s own earnings reports, lowballing YouTube’s revenue by a factor of ten iirc.
that…what?
Advertising costs money. To cover that cost, companies charge us more for their goods and services. I don’t know what is baffling to you about this.
Ads are a way for everyone to contribute a super small amount to keep the thing you’re on, online.
In 2022 Google grossed around $280 billion, and only around 10% of that from Youtube. Before tax they profited around $73 billion, and after tax around $60 billion. They’re doing fine selling ads.
And we paid all of that $280 billion, even those of us with adblockers, because companies charge us more to cover their marketing costs. I pay for google every time I pull out my credit card.
I don’t feel like watching ads to convince even more companies to pay google to advertise to me and buy my data. They’re all making enough money already, and every year they spend less of it on wages or tax for society to function. Their money goes to stock buybacks, payouts to their major shareholders, executive bonuses, and think tanks to push policies and social trends that hurt all of us.
I know I’m dreaming here, but central internet services like google search and youtube should be utilities controlled by the public.
The video pool that Youtube draws from, generated by the public, should be public property, hosted on public servers, internationalized somehow, with an opensource market of frontend interfaces and algorithms to deliver that content to people, instead of one youtube algorithm and one interface designed to meet the profit incentives of google. People should be free to use the algorithm and interface they find most useful.
Suddenly switching to papyrus font at the bottom lol
Are you saying you agree with the Israeli government that Palestinians are a demographic threat?
Do you realize this is an explicitly bigoted sentiment? “Demographic threat” does not mean “some Palestinians are extremists.” It means “Palestinians must not be allowed to become too large a portion of Israel’s demographics.” The Israeli government criticizes Palestinians and Arabs in general for having too many children. This is rhetoric of religious and racial dilution. There are ~9 million Israelis, mainly Jewish, and ~5 million Palestinians, and Israelis do not want to dilute their society with them.
Israel has also non-consensually sterilized thousands of Ethiopian immigrant women, not informing them of the nature of the procedure.
When people call Israel an apartheid state there’s a reason for it
the Israeli government disagrees and regards Palestinians as a “demographic threat.”
I am pointing out that people in Gaza are not Israeli citizens, and the conditions in Gaza are imposed by Israel
The elections that determine those conditions are Israeli elections. Israel prevents Palestinians from voting in those.
Who are you talking about right now? Hexbear? Is your basis for who is a fascist just that they are rude to liberals on the internet and have intense feelings about capitalism and imperialism?
Or because they are aware of the conditions of life imposed in Palestine?
That 50% of the children in Gaza express no will to live? That 95% of the water is contaminated and Israel strictly controls the water supply? That thousands of civilians have been killed by the Israeli army since 2008? That Gaza functions as an open air concentration camp administrated by an openly racist apartheid state? That Israel helped fund and create Hamas in the 70s and 80s as a counterweight to the largely secular leftist PLO and this whole fucking situation is partially blowback from an effort to divide-and-conquer Palestine? That Hamas fucking chased the PLO out of Gaza, and now Hamas is essentially the only militant force left that can resist the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians?
Who else is there for Palestinians to root for? What the fuck are they supposed to do? Just sit in their squalid concentration camp and raise their depressed children to be unemployed adults with no future, in a crumbling city with no concrete to rebuild itself, because a rich nation on the other side of the fence deemed it so?
And in an overseas media environment where no one even fucking talks about any of this shit, and the attack is being treated as this sudden unprovoked thing out of left field, maybe some people are going to overcorrect in the other direction out of sheer frustration?
What the fuck does this even mean?
To my knowledge, pretty much all of the wealth gains have been in China.
First of all, that means food is poorly distributed. You are just disputing the cause.
And yes, conflict if a major cause of hunger. But what is a major cause of conflict? Fucking poverty. Al Qaeda doesn’t recruit from fucking Beverly Hills. Another major cause: US intervention, for the sake of profit and geopolitical dominance, with the dominance ultimately also being for the sake of profit. The world economic system functions as a huge siphon that extracts wealth from the global south and funnels it to wealthy countries where the major institutions of finance are located. Western financial instruments like the IMF and World Bank, alongside direct political and economic pressure, enforce austerity in poor nations, dismantle social safety nets, depress wages, and privatize resources, and this very predictably results in underdevelopment and poverty, which fucking benefits the west because lower wages mean larger profit margins, lower prices and greater market share for the western companies that source their labor there. It’s a fucking global sweatshop economy. And there are consequences to this, when everyone is fucking poor and uneducated and young men see no future for themselves except to become soldiers. It means conflict, which means starvation.
9 million people starve to death every year
The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
God-tier title