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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   3396 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for June 7, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Google was able to lose $2 billion a year on YouTube for over a decade. Additionally Google tweaks search results to favour YT over other platforms. Also it's integrated with Google's ad sales so any competitor needs to come up with an entire ad tech stack to compete.

I would assume those two things are connected. People always point YouTube being run at a loss as a reason why no competitor will appear. But I wouldn't be suprised if it was the case that YouTube is effectively just a loss leader for Google (I mean "Alphabet"). YouTube is such an incredibly effective data harvesting tool that would improve the value dramatically of Google's other services and products.

YouTube also likely has huge administrative bloat, as the Twitter firings demonstrated was the case for Twitter.

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