The words "I should be a millionaire" sure appears a lot. The subject suggests there's a different title, but it really seems like the real subject is how this person isn't a millionaire.
> At one point, I believe it was over 74 million and after a Google search change, that number went down to less than 12 million overnight, so all the backlinks, all the websites that were linking to my site, that boosted my rank, that gave my site a good search cloud. This was all organic. I did not use tricks or anything deceptive. This was all organic traffic. These were all organic backlinks and all of a sudden Google just decided I’m turning it off and they did. So guess what happened? My search traffic completely plummeted.
> I would get called on a regular basis from Google ad execs begging me to put Google ads on my website.
> Like you basically have to give them their cut, otherwise they’re not gonna let you play and they’re going to screw with your search traffic.
Yeah, no, it doesn't work like that. Google search ranking is not perfect, but they have taken search/ad separation very, very, very seriously. You can't even ask questions like "The google ad customer I'm talking to disappeared from search results, did you guys do anything overnight?" It's a big no-no.
It sounds more like a sadly misinformed rant. 90% of startups fail - failure is a natural result. You don't need to bring up a Google conspiracy to explain it.
It’s not a big no-no. There is no Chinese wall. I’ve had AdX reps forward me messages from search quality. It’s all a lie. They want their cut. They’re trying to own the internet. They will be broken up.
Best practices are being followed now; but a large sales team at its worst more than ten years ago might be caught out in bad behavior.
Less plausible is the scenario of failing as a result of ad-pay for search-play. If the equation is proven out, then he, a rational and effective founder, would’ve paid!—And his site would’ve played another day.
Or are we supposed to read an implication that it was worth burning the company to the ground to take a principled stand against 2008 Google?
Meanwhile, the traffic claims defy belief. Livevideo failed to launch.
Well, I wouldn't be surprised if, once in a while, an unscrupulous sales rep hinted that they can get their customers favorable search positions after buying ads.
But I would be really surprised if anyone could follow through with their promises.
Most sales people at Google wouldn't even know where to start looking. They're more familiar with the ad systems. Heck, a lot of engineers couldn't tell you on the spot where to look or whom to inquire about ranking bugs. Add to that the big gulf between sales and engineering, not to mention the sometimes snobbish attitude of the latter toward the former. (”Sales people take our money and blow it on dinners with clients!", forgetting that the money often came in thanks to sales and that e.g. engineers on average traveled less often, but for quite longer).
The launch of LiveVideo was not the issue. We had more traffic than we knew what to do with, and way more than YouTube at the time.
Honestly, things didn't go sideways until Google decided to mess with LiveVideo and the rest of our web properties in search results. Had Google never purchased YouTube, LiveVideo would have probably won that battle hands down.
Without Google money, YouTube would have failed, not LiveVideo.
It happened to a friend of mine last year. He has a small business, a family business and got harassed with dozens of calls to buy a Yelp package of around $1000 a month (which doesn't guarantee more sales, they just push ads, etc and maybe fake reviews). He told them he cannot afford that and not to be called anymore. Few days later two guys in suits showed up to at the business to try to convince him to sign up for the offer. He declined. The aftermath: his rating on their site dropped a few stars, good reviews are pending forever and a few bad ones skim to the top. This is a bad business model!
From what I can tell, this is the story of a 2006-2008 Youtube also-ran that was outbid by Google for celebrity content, had copyright and inappropriate content problems, kept an adult content section on their website, and depended on AdSense for their revenue.
I don't see where the concept of "deplatforming" fits into the narrative provided.
You can check their old site out on Archive.org (the pages all seem to have "Family Filter" set, despite the fact that the tag clouds and "Most Popular Videos" callouts seem to have adult content in them).
The sites were delisted from search engines despite content moderation being put in place. That is deplatforming.
The adult content was put behind a mature section where ads weren't run against the mature content.
LiveVideo and the parents companies network of sites were deplatformed from search results.
Delisting competitors from search results who are meeting all of the requirements of their advertising policies at the time is the issue. The mature content was moderated and put behind mature content filters.
Just to be clear, and without engaging in any other part of your comment: the AdSense guidelines forbid ads on pages that link to or otherwise promote adult content, which this site surely did.
There was absolutely no pornographic content on LiveVideo.com itself. Nor was it ever intended for LiveVideo to have adult content. We created the family filters for mature content. However, sexy content is just simply what people started uploading. We deleted anything that was even remotely pornographic, but there was still some sexy content as there is still plenty of sexy content on YouTube right now.
We did not promote any adult content on LiveVideo.com itself. So LiveVideo.com itself wasn't in violation of these rules.
Some of the other sites in our network possibly had more adult content in nature, but were not adult content websites and were not running AdSense on them.
1. The story seems to acknowledge that there was adult content on the site.
2. There is adult content evident in the Archive.org snapshots of the site.
3. Some of that content appears to be promoted content, links from the front page appear to go to content tagged "xxx", and many of the categories in the directory are also tagged with things like "sexy" and "girls".
4. It's not at all clear what the distinction you're trying to draw between UGC video and... what other kind of video is there on the site? Why is there a family filter at all if there's no adult content on the site?
I agree with most of your comment, but Youtube also had copyright problems at that time. Viacom sued them for $1 billion in 2007 (settled out of court for an undisclosed sum in 2014).
> Viacom sued them for $1 billion in 2007 (settled out of court for an undisclosed sum in 2014).
(...after the district court found in favor of youtube and after it came out that some of Viacom's claims were for things that other parts of Viacom had uploaded for publicity)
Now they have copyright problems in the other direction, with random companies claiming copyright over random videos and nothing to be done unless you're super-famous and can escalate the issue into the press.
> you know, adult content and there’s child porn on some of your properties and whatever
> [getting] sued by the major, by the major record companies for [hosting lyrics]
> Today we get sued by the record companies
I'm not well read on the situation, but it sounds like they had serious moderation problems. It looks like they had adult content on their popular video's page occasionally even with a filter enabled. If they were being de-listed from DMCA and legal complaints, that's on them. A lot of the regulation and laws in this space give a lot of power to copyright holders, and YouTube likely has agreements that give them some leniency that other companies just can't get. I feel like that's less of a Tech Giant problem and more of a massive legal barrier to entry problem.
Occasionally something adult slipped through but we caught it as quickly as humanly possible.
The government never had an issue with us, and we worked with them. The only company enforcing anything was Google, and they kept moving the goal posts every time we talked to them until it became clear there was nothing we could do to resolve these issues to meet their standards, standards they themselves have not met in the past 11+ years.
This is interesting. I'm starting to make a computer security course right now and I've chosen to put it on pornhub. The monetization options are better for creators (I can sell videos!). Obviously, pornhub is going to restrict the audience a bit, so I've been toying with the idea of making a video hosting site with solid monetization options and categories of ads beyond porn.
I think the biggest thing I don't understand is CDNs and delivering the video quickly. If I get some traction in the course, maybe I could launch a site with that content. The monetization options on YouTube are just lacking. You have ads or 5$ / mo subscriptions (if you have 100k subscribers).
My model is going to be 90% free videos with just the solutions to assignments paid. I'll make a small bit on ads, but mostly through 1$ video sales. I was going to offer pdf chapters for each module as well, but since ph only allows image formats and it would be a lot of work to write, I've nixed that idea.
Can't tell if serious. But just in case- ph is blocked by pretty much every corporate network in existence right. That might put a bit of a dent in which computer security experts can access the content.
I suppose getting to the content by bypassing firewalls could be part of the learning experience lol
I think that is actually a feature. I want to do something for hackers, not our corporate overlords. If someone is willing to learn this stuff in their non working hours, they are probably a pretty motivated student.
They may try it--they have the expertise, and the infrastructure--but I think they will try to separate the brands, and I doubt they will be able to do better than vimeo.
I'm pretty sure they will, and they already have a lot of experience doing that.
It's incredible how many people in this topic mention "PornHub", but not "MindGeek". They could just start yet another video streaming site and probably most people wouldn't know that it's using the same technology as the top porn sites.
Yea, maybe if I see some success on there it could encourage them to try out that model. CreatorHub or something. They do already have all the correct infrastructure for it, payments, subscriptions. If the ads were relevant it would be the perfect platform.
The obvious place to put it is an online learning platform, just googling "create online course" shows a dozen different websites with various monetization options.
Or you could do unlisted YouTube videos and a simple pay site. Or Vimeo has some embedding options.
Unlisted is not very well protected. Once someone has the url, it is out there. PH at least ties the purchases to an account. Sure, someone can download and throw them on torrents, but it feels less like leaving the barn door open.
As for differentiation, simply, my course will be the best. It's designed to take you from zero to security analyst. Those MIT lectures are taught with chalk and don't lay the foundations properly. The topics are good though, cool to see something on symbolic execution.
I want to give people the background knowledge. Like buffer overflows are easy if you understand stack frames, and assembly. I want to teach that stuff first before telling someone to go stumble through an exploitation exercise. I want to do that for every topic.
I am not, but it is https://www.pornhub.com/model/cybering. Obviously, NSFW. It has the setup module right now, and an in progress command line basics. The topics will get more advanced after I get through the prerequisites. Thanks for checking it out!
I tried to make a udemy course a few years ago, same topic. My biggest issue was that I needed a complete course for that. Maybe my goals are too lofty, but I got 5 or 6 modules in and lost momentum. I wanted a place where I could post as I made things.
Keep in mind, YouTube recently announced that they're planning on going after computer security information with their claws soon. That means Google doesn't like that information either. Even though PH is very limiting, that would probably be a better option than YouTube because you're very unlikely to ever see a cent from monetization there. I follow a lawyer with a small (100k) YouTube channel and he has to fight tooth and nail with YouTube for every video he uploads, no matter how innocuous. Whether you follow their rules or not, even if you walk on eggshells and avoid everything even remotely controversial, none of it matters.
This article should say - you can't compete with google using google.
The "final blow" was adsense being cutoff. Their revenue model to compete with google was ... adsense. OK.
Their traffic model was google search. Ok.
Between the lines it sounds like some aggressive SEO, and maybe the network click bounce thing (you click on one video, and then it clicks through to another site etc). Be curious what their content moderation story was.
Seriously, if you are building a google competitor, you probably need to use something other than adsense. And a reminder, adsense is a key revenue generation value add.
The paying of creators definitely anti-competitive. I do think there will be a youtube alternative (small scale) eventually.
The problem is a lot of these "competitors" get filled with absolutely trash / hateful content right away because the first people to use them are the rejects from youtube and the moderation teams are so glad to have someone show up they don't moderate heavily enough. Checkout some of the reddit competitors, total disgusting trash.
Nothing you said is wrong, but that is part of the problem right? To do anything online, you have to use google to some extent, so how can you compete in the first place? Google is already a monopoly in search which makes it impossible to make something online that requires search (ie., almost everything) and have it properly compete.
Exactly. You may as well try to compete with a railroad monopoly while at the same time not using any of their existing rail infrastructure. Good fucking luck.
Pornhub probably could. They've got the tech, the traffic, the money, the advertising infrastructure, they've got everything they need to launch a youtube competitor because the big tech companies don't really touch porn.
> "the big tech companies don't really touch porn."
Isn't that the case because mainstream American advertisers don't want anything to do with it? I don't think it's a matter of west coast tech companies being prudes, but rather tech companies appeasing big consumer goods companies that spend billions on advertising, like P&G, J&J, PepsiCo, etc. And those companies are in turn likely appeasing 'middle america' by trying to keep their brands as bland and "family friendly" as possible.
Edit: (And now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure Amazon sells pornography, so that's one of the big tech companies at least that is willing to. And I don't think it's a coincidence that advertising from those big consumer goods companies isn't nearly as important to Amazon... Then again Amazon doesn't allow nudity on twitch, which perhaps could be considered roughly analogous to Google's similar ban of pornography on youtube. Perhaps twitch, as a consumer brand, is subject to the same social pressures from the American public as PepsiCo?)
Anyone else find it mildly strange how such a huge portion of the economy functions solely on the production and consumption of terrible products such as soda?
It’s retardation juice. You have to keep people in a permanent malnutrition-induced malaise of retardation to grease the path for them to accept all of the even worse things you want to throw at them.
I'm more worried about the huge supporting portion of the economy that is advertising. Seems to have much more harmful effects on everything around us, including but not limited to making people consume more terrible products such as soda than they otherwise would.
Although that also describes another beverage, coffee. The difference between the coffee and soft drink industries is interesting though. Two massive corporations dominate almost the entire soft drink industry, with a handful of minor providers (notably Keurig Dr Pepper) and a long tail of much smaller 'boutique', novelty, or regional brands. Comparatively, no coffee company controls as much of the industry as either the Coca Cola Company or PepsiCo do.
(Also, PepsiCo in particular owns a ton of other non-beverage brands. Their subsidiary Frito-Lay produces the brands Lay's, Cheetos, Doritos, etc. PepsiCo is huge for American consumers. To your point though, snack food isn't much better than sugar water.)
Pop isn’t a terrible product. The issue, like anything, is overuse.
You can make the same argument for anything, from butter to guns to video games to literally anything that plugs into the wall and consumes electricity.
Use anything beyond reason and it becomes destructive.
> And now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure Amazon sells pornography, so that's one of the big tech companies at least that is willing to.
Amazon also runs an entirely separate and special cloud staffed only by US citizens to assist the military in running software that decides who to detain, torture, and possibly murder, so it is unsurprising that they have no corresponding aversion to media depicting less violent interactions.
First, Google isn't a monopoly on search. Popular? yes. Best product? For most use cases, yeah. The fact that the search competition is a click away makes it dominant in the market but not a monopoly or monopsony.
Second, companies are doing fine in this regard by bypassing Google. There are online businesses that exist solely on Amazon and Instagram. Building out a strong social presence is one way to get traffic without relying on Google search. Several major content hosting sites (images/gifs) have taken off in part because of their social saturation.
Is it easy? No, but to GP's point it doesn't sound like they were being strategic in this regard either.
I should rephrase my argument. What I really meant to highlight is you cannot have a business online that google does not approve of without great difficulty, given to be online you must use google in some extent. That is a problem and decidedly anti-competitive.
Also I don't care too much about the OP's attitude or lack of strategy, actors don't have to be paragons of virtue in order to be wronged and their situation be an example of a larger problem.
Also, finally, why do you need to dispute the basic facts, no one in their right mind thinks Google isn't a monopoly on search, I think that is more or less an established fact at this point.
> What I really meant to highlight is you cannot have a business online that google does not approve of without great difficulty
I disagree. I have worked at several companies with very successful sales and marketing departments where referrals from google were a noticeable but ultimately unimportant part of the revenue picture. I have also worked at a place that literally lived and died by the grace of a top ranking on google, once we hit the 2nd and then 3rd page, the business was basically dead. This sucked, but it was very nice for the company that replaced us. There is no inherent reason why one company should be entitled to the slot any more than any other (besides the google algorithm that determines ranking).
> no one in their right mind thinks Google isn't a monopoly on search, I think that is more or less an established fact at this point.
"A monopoly exists when a specific person or enterprise is the only supplier of a particular commodity" [0]. Bing exists so by definition, you are wrong.
There is probably choice from an end-user's point of view, yes. On that front you are arguing about best search results.
But as site owner, you need traffic. SEO for some search engine built by your brother, used exclusively by your family, wont help you grow your business. You need eyeballs, and more than 90% of those are on google [0]. Pretending this is a perfectly functioning market and websites can just ignore google is... unrealistic.
It's definitely not a perfectly competitive market but this trope about GAFAM being monopolies is tiring. A monopoly can stagnate development on their product, raise prices and there's nothing customers can do because they have literally no other option. That is why monopolies are bad.
If Google were to try and charge users for search, everyone would immediately switch to bing which keeps them in check from raising prices like they would if they were the only provider of search. They are in no way a monopoly.
Are you suggesting that we should ignore people misusing economic terms when discussing economic policy? I don't see how ignoring blatantly false facts is better than educating people such that they can properly discuss a topic using the proper terms.
For a proper exchange of ideas to function, the listening side has to try it's best to interpret the message as intended. Yes, to a degree does that include ignoring misuse of language. That obviously doesn't mean you can never give any feedback.
> educating people such that they can properly discuss a topic using the proper terms
Where did you do that? The only recommendation for a better term I see is "harmfully disproportionate market power", still quite a usable mouthful and made by someone else. Your contribution seems to boil down to "your wrong", and I'm still unsure if this is intended to be about the use of the word or the actual point. Probably both, with one being secretly used to support the other.
His point is that Google isn't a monopoly from the user side. What if Google started offering the ability for websites to pay to increase their pagerank?
If you have a problem with people using the word monopoly as synonymous with anti-trust then just interpret it as anti-trust and ignore the word.
For example, Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning:
Any abuse by one or more undertakings of a dominant position within the internal market or in a substantial part of it shall be prohibited as incompatible with the internal market in so far as it may affect trade between Member States. Such abuse may, in particular, consist in: (a) directly or indirectly imposing unfair purchase or selling prices or other unfair trading conditions; (b) limiting production, markets or technical development to the prejudice of consumers;
With Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 we get supreme court cases that states things like: The purpose of the [Sherman] Act is not to protect businesses from the working of the market; it is to protect the public from the failure of the market. The law directs itself not against conduct which is competitive, even severely so, but against conduct which unfairly tends to destroy competition itself.
And in an other supreme court case:
The goal was to prevent restraints of free competition in business and commercial transactions which tended to restrict production, raise prices, or otherwise control the market to the detriment of purchasers or consumers of goods and services, all of which had come to be regarded as a special form of public injury. For that reason the phrase "restraint of trade," which, as will presently appear, had a well understood meaning in common law, was made the means of defining the activities prohibited.
Not a word about monopoly but a lot about behavior which in common speech people call monopoly but actually refer to behavior which is illegal according to anti-trust.
Even so, by the definitions you're copying, Google's competition is still a click away for consumers.
Whether you use anti-trust synonymously with the word monopoly doesn't change the fact that Google will still show Bing and Yandex in the search results.
An example of anti-competitive behavior here is actually from Amazon, when they had de-listed Apple TV and Chromecast from their marketplace for years because it competed with their Fire Stick.
> If you have a problem with people using the word monopoly as synonymous with anti-trust then just interpret it as anti-trust and ignore the word.
Are you suggesting that we should ignore people misusing economic terms when discussing economic policy? I don't see how ignoring blatantly false facts is better than educating people such that they can properly discuss a topic using the proper terms.
> The paying of creators definitely anti-competitive.
Its actually very common practice and has been for a very long time (way before 2007). Once people get mindshare, they get offers. The top you tubers, twitch streamers, etc have negotiated contracts with terms that are very different that what a standard creator has.
Think of it just like Hollywood. The top talents are sough after and franchises are built around them, the rest have to audition.
Haven’t used reddit in over a year and hardly visit YouTube. #1 competitor for my time is reading a book. The freedom and clarity I feel now that I’m not plugged in to these types of social networks makes me believe reddit is also “disgusting trash”.
I also am trying to read more books and unplug, but Reddit isn’t so bad if you find good sub-Reddit’s. The main site and default sub-Reddit’s are definitely trash, though.
The same is true of YouTube if you heavily scrutinize your subscription list.
It’s extremely annoying because there are pockets of communities that remind me of the Internet before the masses trashed it and everything was centralized around a handful of sites. I’ve been playing with Mastodon lately and that reminds me more of the 90s Internet.
If I'm interested in a subject / person, I try to both read about it and listen video about it / from him. I found that the two information sources are often complementary.
You are painting with a very broad brush. There are tens of thousands of subreddits covering a dizzying array of topics. Many are low information garbage communities, but many are amazing resources that can't be found anywhere else.
I'm not suggesting you change your personal choice, but as someone who is a sometimes member of those communities, I resent being called trash.
Book publishers let white nationalists, pedophiles, sex offenders, and others publish books. Books don't even have age gated ratings, so parents don't even have any idea what kind of content their children are consuming when they read a book. If you want disgusting trash, pick up 'In Defense of Elitism' sometime. It's the only book I have destroyed after reading several chapters.
When you paint a medium or platform with a broad brush, and chastise them for not censoring it to your liking, you should at least check the alternative you're recommending is at least as censorial.
>The paying of creators definitely anti-competitive
It's really not any different than what Netflix is doing now, right?
Discounting SEO, the major issue was that they didn't build their own ad network. You set up business in Google's front yard and didn't like it when they told you to get out.
The ad network (or rather the monetization model) is the hardest part of building a video sharing site. If that part wasn't figured out then it's hard for me to believe you were actually serious about building a content network.
Given how much this guy cried about how much money he is "owed" I'm less likely to believe he was slighted and more likely to believe he was a greedy exec who was in over his head.
It does seem a bit out of proportion, News Corp bought a business that proceeded to sink.
I think Peertube and other Fediverse stacks like Mastodon, Pleroma, Pixelfed & Lemmy will continue to bleed users from more traditional sites over the next few years. They've significantly lowered the barriers to running your own social site, creating a great variety of communities that otherwise would be much smaller or non-existent.
Yes, MySpace wasn't making any money if I recall and so had no real business plan. Sounds like the same like the guy complaining. They don't have real business plans to make money except an exit strategy to sell it to someone else. Their revenue was going to come from adsense? And he's complaining about google cutting him off. He should have been thinking how to make money, like his own adsense.
Why don't you think that the hardest part is acquiring the viewers? At least nowadays, network traffic is cheap. You get 1TB for 1 euro [0]. You need 22 Mbps for 1080HD [1], which means you can stream 100 hours for 1 euro.
If you stream 5min clips, that's 1200 clips for 1 euro. There should be enough ad networks that offer 2 euro CPM to make a profit.
On the other hand, how can they make a profit if nobody is discovering their site?
When you flip that on its head those rates actually seem pretty nightmarish when trying to compete with YouTube.
1200 views for 1 euro, that's 1000 eur for a million views. On top of that YouTube's rates of paying creators are in the same ballpark at 1k/million views.
So yeah your ad model needs be paying 2k+ per million views ( any one more familiar with the ad industry know the real value made curiously? ) on a video or your screwed
But it's not. Your example is contrived, as Hetzner likely doesn't expect you to stream a 100 hours of 1080p HD content to 100 people simultaneously. Your users would have a laughably bad experience at scale. On a single box, it's unlikely you could max out your throughput - you could at most support 45 users on a single Hetzner node (1080p @ 22Mbps on a Gigabit connection in the best case).
If you are going to be serving content with any level of seriousness you need a CDN. 1TB of bandwidth on Cloudfront costs $87. Akamai charges $100-$150. Thats 100x than 1 euro/TB you initially priced out.
Which you'd not be if you were just starting out. The cost also won't come down 90% no matter who you are. Big streaming networks often have to build their own to compete.
How would you build a video streaming service without a CDN? A CDN doesn't just solve the content distribution problem - it also solves the bandwidth problem.
With a 1Gig connection you can only serve ~45 concurrents streaming 1080p. If you wanted to support more than 45 concurrents, you would need
1. To distribute content to separate instances
2. A routing infrastructure to reliably route connections to that content.
And then, congrats, you have just built your own CDN - albeit in one datacenter. If you don't want your users on the other side of the country constantly complaining that your site is slow compared to Vimeo, you would have to build it on the other side as well.
If you believe your hodgepodge CDN is going to be much cheaper than Cloudfront (on the order of 1 Euro/month, where you could support it on ~1.5M views/month), then you should probably skip the whole video sharing nonsense, and get rich becoming a CDN provider :)
My point is, you don't need an expensive global CDN if your end goal is to optimize for ad-revenue within the U.S market. I don't know why you stuck on the CDN, and it sounds like you are using it as a hammer to achieve scalability.
I'm stuck on the CDN because you need something like a CDN to serve any meaningful number of concurrents. The numbers I quoted for cloudfront were for the US.
If you believe otherwise, please enlighten me on how you can build a HD video streaming service for 100 concurrents without a CDN. Like I mentioned, on a 1GbE connection, you can serve a theoretical max of 45 users on one node. Where do you go from there without something that looks like CDN?
Do you have a source for this? YouTube isn't broken out separately in Alphabet earning reports and the last anyone authoritative talked about YouTube finances this way was several years ago AFAICT.
This is why people want Alphabet to be split up. Google is leveraging their monopoly position in online advertising to benefit their monopoly position in online video, as well as their monopoly position in online search.
> Seriously, if you are building a google competitor, you probably need to use something other than adsense.
That's kind of the point. Using Monopoly power in one industry (advertisement or search) to cripple a competitor in another (video) is kind of the definition of anti-competitive behavior.
I am assuming you are implying that a human in google made the decision to bury competition search results and deny the competition’s AdWords relationship and not benign factors like bad SEO or misbehaving website
Google has been stung and made to show search results in an unbiased way with relation to their products. While it happened in the past the current monopoly, anticompetitive, antitrust commission in Europe California and some awaking Asian countries prevent that kind of behavior
That is the crux of antitrust/monopoly protection commission. The reason the exist
> Seriously, if you are building a google competitor, you probably need to use something other than adsense. And a reminder, adsense is a key revenue generation value add.
OK but this story begins in 2006. At that time there basically was only Google for generating significant traffic. Facebook was growing and Twitter had just launched but neither had the size of audience (or real ad products) to generate the type of traffic Google could
>Checkout some of the reddit competitors, total disgusting trash.
These people where on reddit up until recently you just never visited the subs that got banned. It took some loud squealing to make the admins do something, then the result was way worse. It made the "disgusting trash sites" and the people that use them more vigilant that why none are really growing.
Reddit has also changed how it wants it's users to use the site. Previously users would subscribe to a collection of subreddits and have a feed of them.
Then a bunch of subreddits got banned and more quarantined. They labelled those who subscribed to a quarantined as a "community" and not just something you subbed to.
Now any subreddit you "join" and "leave" and they have dropped the subscribe/unsubscribe wording further enforcing the isolated community angle of invested enthusiasts rather than the casual subscriber to random things. Now if you subscribe to some random subreddit you can be viewed as agreeing with all its postings and viewpoints where previously people wouldn't think this way about using the site.
Things won't grow as they are aopealing to the hardcore focus users rather than the casual ones. Any competition would do well to appeal to the more casual and disconnected users.
So I was looking at old blog posts about LiveVideo and saw a reference to a rumor that LiveVideo paid off creators to cause the initial jump from Youtube to LiveVideo. There might have been a lot of shady dealings on both sides, but it was so long ago someone from each side should be able to do a tell all with the actual details. http://willvideoforfood.com/2007/02/07/livevideo-vs-youtube-...
Hi,
I was really screwed by Tech Giant Companies many times in my life for a big money. But now, here I am reborn to bring justice. I reported 1 case to the European Commission and cases like mine led to a new law which was introduced last month:
If somebody is too lazy too read. Search providers have to publish their search algorithm inside European union within one year from the date of publication
Sounds like a bold claim .. and yes it is. Only the "main parameters" must be published.
From your source (emphasis mine):
> Providers of [..] online search engines should not be required to disclose the detailed functioning of their ranking mechanisms, including algorithms, under this Regulation. [..]
> A general description of the main ranking parameters should safeguard [against bad faith manipulation of ranking by third parties]
Main parameters being defined as:
> The notion of main parameter should be understood to refer to any general criteria, processes, specific signals incorporated into algorithms or other adjustment or demotion mechanisms used in connection with the ranking.
I wonder if a standard library or service could be written that detects search engine manipulation, in order to provide a mathematical confidence that it occurred of some kind.
So for example, you make metube.com and it shows up on all the search engines. Off the top of my head, maybe it watches the rank over time, kind of like a stock ticker. If Google detects metube.com and buries your listing, but the listing stays the same on more egalitarian search engines like duckduckgo.com, that would show as a divergence in the historical rankings.
So you could get answers like "there's a 77% likelihood that Google buried your link" or "Google's result diverges 23% from other search engines" or something like that.
Then an overall measure of the top million sites or whatever could be used to generate an overall fairness/bias rating.
If it showed enough manipulation over a long enough time, maybe that would be grounds to regulate or break up the largest search engines. Or maybe the law wouldn't be necessary, because a browser plugin could say "there's a 95% chance that this search result has not been manipulated" or even request results with a high degree of manipulation as a way of finding the canonical truth.
Might have been possible back in the day, but now the search engine market is just Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo's upcoming crawler (their own bot indexes my website but I'm not certain if it's being used for results). Even Yahoo uses bing for results:
Is there a non ranty description of what happened ?
I read the first couple of paragraphs and between the rantings how he should be a multimillionaire and how Google will destroy all of his projects, I gave up.
It is obviously a very emotional subject for Trent, but that's just not the best way to present what happened to a third party.
Live Video was a more successful video platform in the mid 2000s until Google bought YouTube and leveraged their monopoly on search and ads to cut off traffic to Live Video. They also paid content creators to leave Live Video and sign exclusive contracts with the cash Google injected to the company. The only reason Justin TV survived is that they pivoted to gaming to avoid competing with YouTube.
I admire the spirit. It's right up there with lets see who we can attack....hmm...US military...yeah they seem about the right size as a worthy opponent.
The only company competing successfully with google is facebook, and they are both giant ad factories that will violate your privacy without batting an eye. Wondering if there is a ceiling in how much revenue an ad company can make using reasonable methods to generate revenue, and there just is no other way but by pushing crap to our browsers.
So to compete and beat facebook and google one has to be good at the ad game not just the content game.
Whoever thought google will allow a competitor to use google’s own platform to grow and threaten their own video ad stream should probs not be in a company’s board for a while.
I have a hard time believing that their website was more popular than YouTube. I remember using loads of different video streaming services before YouTube was bought by Google (e.g. Vimeo, Google Videos, etc) and I've never heard of livevideo.
Also, Google Videos was Google's own YouTube competitor from before they bought YouTube, which arguably was anti-competitive because it was much easier to search for Google Videos from Google than for YouTube videos.
The more likely explanation for why their search rank plummited is their shady backlinking between their properties.
> The only one that survived was Justin. That eventually became twitch because they picked video games as a category and just eliminated everything else. And YouTube didn’t really go after one market like that. They went after all video on the internet, so Google let them kind of have video games and that was it.
Their explanation for why Twitch succeeded doesn't hold water. My understanding is that video gaming is currently one of the most popular categories on YouTube today and probably has been since the beginning (e.g. PewDiePie started as a video gaming youtuber). They're directly going after Twitch with YouTube Gaming. And Twitch obviously hasn't been deplatformed by Google Search.
Also it's not good branding. I immediately thought this was LiveLeak, which is a different site than LiveVideo.
But you're right - there are lots of players who carved out niches on the market to be profitable, since hosting video content is expensive. Vimeo, Twitch, even LiveLeak, cater to specific content while the generalist Youtube burned money for over a decade. When all the other generalists were pivoting, LiveVideo plowed ahead with something that wasn't profitable. This post-hoc rationalization and finger pointing feels like sour grapes.
Google's branding is the worst, however. They had to buy YouTube, in part, because Google Video was such a failure. Nobody saw Google Video as something to put video INTO; everyone assumed it was a search engine for online video.
They haven't improved. Google's app store is still called "Google Play," which doesn't tell anyone it's an app store. It sounds like something gaming-related, and that's it. Google Plus... need we go on?
YouTube was a simply better product. As was Facebook compared to mySpace.
The innovative features weren't the right ones. YouTube may not have had them but ultimately in the market today we haven't got those features that seemed such a good idea at the time. Just because you can do clever stuff, e.g. showing multiple streams, doesn't mean that is what people want.
The content was better on YouTube unless you really did want porn. It is not a problem Google paying people to do content for their platform in exclusive deals. They had pockets deep enough to do such things and this investment has paid off.
Sure the startup with $50 million isn't going to be able to just sign up all of the big names but they also were not going to be able to pay as well as Google when it came to monetisation since they were going with adSense. Had they developed something special when it came to ad sales then they could have been on to something.
Then in the search results there is no reason to believe Google were doing anything shady. The shadiest part could be the way Youtube was built for SEO. Every developer wants good SEO so it is only natural to try and excel in this area. Within YouTube they potentially had a better idea of how the Google search engine works so they could have written their front end to specifically game the system. I doubt they did that to a level beyond what outside developers can achieve.
I looked at some of the webarchive screen shots and the live viewer counts on the videos seem kind of low, but that might just be my modern take on how many views is a lot.
> I should be a multimillionaire ... we should have been what ... a major competitor of YouTube and we should be a multibillion dollar Unicorn Tech Company. And the only reason we’re not is because of anti competitive behavior from Google
Hmm ok. Are you sure that was the only reason?
All those organic links from those 74 million of websites do not disappear even if you do disappear from the search results.
The mention that google executives contacted them to discuss the $3,000 a month he could of made if he ran google ads - that is genuinely peanuts. This makes me think that was a really small operation that didn't have a hope in hell in going big and competing with vimeo or dailymotion, let alone google. For comparison I was running an AdSense site around the same time and was easily clearing £800-1000 (approx $1500 I guess) a month with only about 150,000-200,000 visits/month (CPMs were higher in those days - I get about the same traffic now but only about £150-300 a month now)
If you these google "executives" (p.s. these wont have been "executives" wasting their time on a tiny publisher like this, you'd be lucky to even get a call from an actual google employee at that size - any tiny publisher deals like this would be farmed out to third party "partner" companies... the real actual executives would be talking to the New York Timess/Conde nasts/ESPNs of the world where the serious money is worth their time) are suggesting you could get up to $3,000 a month then sorry you were never destined for the big time.
Sounds like those 74 million (74,000,000 sites linking to you - that is loads) sites sending traffic your way were actually only sending in a trickle of users otherwise you'd be able to sell a lot of advertising. Even if each site only sent a single measly user per month, 74,000,000 visitors a month is a chunky visitor base and would easily net you more than $3,000 - even with a CPM of 25c ("good" publishers can expect rates well in excess of this - easily $1 and perhaps $3,4 or even 5 for really top-tier stuff) you'd be looking at about $18,500 a month. You'd easily be able to do direct deals with advertisers and get better CPMs at that sort of level.
Start ups fail all the time. It is hard and it is sad but I don't like it when people don't accept responsibility for their own failures though. This attitude of "it was everyone's fault apart from mine!" annoys me a lot
You're confusing stats from my other company with LiveVideo. Those numbers are from my second startup that Google messed with. It was a much smaller operation nowhere near the size of LiveVideo.com. The amount of traffic I did in a year with my startup was a weekend for LiveVideo.com.
Is there an article? I just see videos (and a transcript of a video), and when I click on "Read" in the top right corner, lots of other articles appear?
151 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 229 ms ] threadI can’t see it, but Id like to listen to this instead of reading it
> I would get called on a regular basis from Google ad execs begging me to put Google ads on my website.
> Like you basically have to give them their cut, otherwise they’re not gonna let you play and they’re going to screw with your search traffic.
Yeah, no, it doesn't work like that. Google search ranking is not perfect, but they have taken search/ad separation very, very, very seriously. You can't even ask questions like "The google ad customer I'm talking to disappeared from search results, did you guys do anything overnight?" It's a big no-no.
It sounds more like a sadly misinformed rant. 90% of startups fail - failure is a natural result. You don't need to bring up a Google conspiracy to explain it.
Less plausible is the scenario of failing as a result of ad-pay for search-play. If the equation is proven out, then he, a rational and effective founder, would’ve paid!—And his site would’ve played another day.
Or are we supposed to read an implication that it was worth burning the company to the ground to take a principled stand against 2008 Google?
Meanwhile, the traffic claims defy belief. Livevideo failed to launch.
But I would be really surprised if anyone could follow through with their promises.
Honestly, things didn't go sideways until Google decided to mess with LiveVideo and the rest of our web properties in search results. Had Google never purchased YouTube, LiveVideo would have probably won that battle hands down.
Without Google money, YouTube would have failed, not LiveVideo.
And apparently she ended up being fired by Yelp.
I don't see where the concept of "deplatforming" fits into the narrative provided.
You can check their old site out on Archive.org (the pages all seem to have "Family Filter" set, despite the fact that the tag clouds and "Most Popular Videos" callouts seem to have adult content in them).
The adult content was put behind a mature section where ads weren't run against the mature content.
LiveVideo and the parents companies network of sites were deplatformed from search results.
Delisting competitors from search results who are meeting all of the requirements of their advertising policies at the time is the issue. The mature content was moderated and put behind mature content filters.
We did not promote any adult content on LiveVideo.com itself. So LiveVideo.com itself wasn't in violation of these rules.
Some of the other sites in our network possibly had more adult content in nature, but were not adult content websites and were not running AdSense on them.
1. The story seems to acknowledge that there was adult content on the site.
2. There is adult content evident in the Archive.org snapshots of the site.
3. Some of that content appears to be promoted content, links from the front page appear to go to content tagged "xxx", and many of the categories in the directory are also tagged with things like "sexy" and "girls".
4. It's not at all clear what the distinction you're trying to draw between UGC video and... what other kind of video is there on the site? Why is there a family filter at all if there's no adult content on the site?
(...after the district court found in favor of youtube and after it came out that some of Viacom's claims were for things that other parts of Viacom had uploaded for publicity)
> you know, adult content and there’s child porn on some of your properties and whatever
> [getting] sued by the major, by the major record companies for [hosting lyrics]
> Today we get sued by the record companies
I'm not well read on the situation, but it sounds like they had serious moderation problems. It looks like they had adult content on their popular video's page occasionally even with a filter enabled. If they were being de-listed from DMCA and legal complaints, that's on them. A lot of the regulation and laws in this space give a lot of power to copyright holders, and YouTube likely has agreements that give them some leniency that other companies just can't get. I feel like that's less of a Tech Giant problem and more of a massive legal barrier to entry problem.
The government never had an issue with us, and we worked with them. The only company enforcing anything was Google, and they kept moving the goal posts every time we talked to them until it became clear there was nothing we could do to resolve these issues to meet their standards, standards they themselves have not met in the past 11+ years.
I think the biggest thing I don't understand is CDNs and delivering the video quickly. If I get some traction in the course, maybe I could launch a site with that content. The monetization options on YouTube are just lacking. You have ads or 5$ / mo subscriptions (if you have 100k subscribers).
My model is going to be 90% free videos with just the solutions to assignments paid. I'll make a small bit on ads, but mostly through 1$ video sales. I was going to offer pdf chapters for each module as well, but since ph only allows image formats and it would be a lot of work to write, I've nixed that idea.
I find this hilarious, but at the same time I am wondering whether you're serious? I'm confused now..
I suppose getting to the content by bypassing firewalls could be part of the learning experience lol
I'm pretty sure they will, and they already have a lot of experience doing that.
It's incredible how many people in this topic mention "PornHub", but not "MindGeek". They could just start yet another video streaming site and probably most people wouldn't know that it's using the same technology as the top porn sites.
Or you could do unlisted YouTube videos and a simple pay site. Or Vimeo has some embedding options.
The main problem I see is product differentiation, e.g. MIT has a computer security course: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqmQg-cszw4&list=PLUl4u3cNGP.... If someone wants to learn they'd probably watch something like that instead of your course.
As for differentiation, simply, my course will be the best. It's designed to take you from zero to security analyst. Those MIT lectures are taught with chalk and don't lay the foundations properly. The topics are good though, cool to see something on symbolic execution.
I want to give people the background knowledge. Like buffer overflows are easy if you understand stack frames, and assembly. I want to teach that stuff first before telling someone to go stumble through an exploitation exercise. I want to do that for every topic.
Have you considered Patreon?
Some editing would be great to readability.
The "final blow" was adsense being cutoff. Their revenue model to compete with google was ... adsense. OK.
Their traffic model was google search. Ok.
Between the lines it sounds like some aggressive SEO, and maybe the network click bounce thing (you click on one video, and then it clicks through to another site etc). Be curious what their content moderation story was.
Seriously, if you are building a google competitor, you probably need to use something other than adsense. And a reminder, adsense is a key revenue generation value add.
The paying of creators definitely anti-competitive. I do think there will be a youtube alternative (small scale) eventually.
The problem is a lot of these "competitors" get filled with absolutely trash / hateful content right away because the first people to use them are the rejects from youtube and the moderation teams are so glad to have someone show up they don't moderate heavily enough. Checkout some of the reddit competitors, total disgusting trash.
That literally happened.
Isn't that the case because mainstream American advertisers don't want anything to do with it? I don't think it's a matter of west coast tech companies being prudes, but rather tech companies appeasing big consumer goods companies that spend billions on advertising, like P&G, J&J, PepsiCo, etc. And those companies are in turn likely appeasing 'middle america' by trying to keep their brands as bland and "family friendly" as possible.
Edit: (And now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure Amazon sells pornography, so that's one of the big tech companies at least that is willing to. And I don't think it's a coincidence that advertising from those big consumer goods companies isn't nearly as important to Amazon... Then again Amazon doesn't allow nudity on twitch, which perhaps could be considered roughly analogous to Google's similar ban of pornography on youtube. Perhaps twitch, as a consumer brand, is subject to the same social pressures from the American public as PepsiCo?)
Although that also describes another beverage, coffee. The difference between the coffee and soft drink industries is interesting though. Two massive corporations dominate almost the entire soft drink industry, with a handful of minor providers (notably Keurig Dr Pepper) and a long tail of much smaller 'boutique', novelty, or regional brands. Comparatively, no coffee company controls as much of the industry as either the Coca Cola Company or PepsiCo do.
(Also, PepsiCo in particular owns a ton of other non-beverage brands. Their subsidiary Frito-Lay produces the brands Lay's, Cheetos, Doritos, etc. PepsiCo is huge for American consumers. To your point though, snack food isn't much better than sugar water.)
You can make the same argument for anything, from butter to guns to video games to literally anything that plugs into the wall and consumes electricity.
Use anything beyond reason and it becomes destructive.
Amazon also runs an entirely separate and special cloud staffed only by US citizens to assist the military in running software that decides who to detain, torture, and possibly murder, so it is unsurprising that they have no corresponding aversion to media depicting less violent interactions.
First, Google isn't a monopoly on search. Popular? yes. Best product? For most use cases, yeah. The fact that the search competition is a click away makes it dominant in the market but not a monopoly or monopsony.
Second, companies are doing fine in this regard by bypassing Google. There are online businesses that exist solely on Amazon and Instagram. Building out a strong social presence is one way to get traffic without relying on Google search. Several major content hosting sites (images/gifs) have taken off in part because of their social saturation.
Is it easy? No, but to GP's point it doesn't sound like they were being strategic in this regard either.
Also I don't care too much about the OP's attitude or lack of strategy, actors don't have to be paragons of virtue in order to be wronged and their situation be an example of a larger problem.
Also, finally, why do you need to dispute the basic facts, no one in their right mind thinks Google isn't a monopoly on search, I think that is more or less an established fact at this point.
I disagree. I have worked at several companies with very successful sales and marketing departments where referrals from google were a noticeable but ultimately unimportant part of the revenue picture. I have also worked at a place that literally lived and died by the grace of a top ranking on google, once we hit the 2nd and then 3rd page, the business was basically dead. This sucked, but it was very nice for the company that replaced us. There is no inherent reason why one company should be entitled to the slot any more than any other (besides the google algorithm that determines ranking).
"A monopoly exists when a specific person or enterprise is the only supplier of a particular commodity" [0]. Bing exists so by definition, you are wrong.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly
But as site owner, you need traffic. SEO for some search engine built by your brother, used exclusively by your family, wont help you grow your business. You need eyeballs, and more than 90% of those are on google [0]. Pretending this is a perfectly functioning market and websites can just ignore google is... unrealistic.
[0] http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share
If Google were to try and charge users for search, everyone would immediately switch to bing which keeps them in check from raising prices like they would if they were the only provider of search. They are in no way a monopoly.
If you substitute "harmfully disproportionate market power" for "monopoly", the points most people are making remain similar.
> educating people such that they can properly discuss a topic using the proper terms
Where did you do that? The only recommendation for a better term I see is "harmfully disproportionate market power", still quite a usable mouthful and made by someone else. Your contribution seems to boil down to "your wrong", and I'm still unsure if this is intended to be about the use of the word or the actual point. Probably both, with one being secretly used to support the other.
Google -> search results (for free) -> website (owner paid for seo/adwords and charge the customer)
Similar thing happened with google maps while they were never a monopoly by your definition because other solutions exist.
For example, Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning:
Any abuse by one or more undertakings of a dominant position within the internal market or in a substantial part of it shall be prohibited as incompatible with the internal market in so far as it may affect trade between Member States. Such abuse may, in particular, consist in: (a) directly or indirectly imposing unfair purchase or selling prices or other unfair trading conditions; (b) limiting production, markets or technical development to the prejudice of consumers;
With Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 we get supreme court cases that states things like: The purpose of the [Sherman] Act is not to protect businesses from the working of the market; it is to protect the public from the failure of the market. The law directs itself not against conduct which is competitive, even severely so, but against conduct which unfairly tends to destroy competition itself.
And in an other supreme court case:
The goal was to prevent restraints of free competition in business and commercial transactions which tended to restrict production, raise prices, or otherwise control the market to the detriment of purchasers or consumers of goods and services, all of which had come to be regarded as a special form of public injury. For that reason the phrase "restraint of trade," which, as will presently appear, had a well understood meaning in common law, was made the means of defining the activities prohibited.
Not a word about monopoly but a lot about behavior which in common speech people call monopoly but actually refer to behavior which is illegal according to anti-trust.
Whether you use anti-trust synonymously with the word monopoly doesn't change the fact that Google will still show Bing and Yandex in the search results.
An example of anti-competitive behavior here is actually from Amazon, when they had de-listed Apple TV and Chromecast from their marketplace for years because it competed with their Fire Stick.
Are you suggesting that we should ignore people misusing economic terms when discussing economic policy? I don't see how ignoring blatantly false facts is better than educating people such that they can properly discuss a topic using the proper terms.
Its actually very common practice and has been for a very long time (way before 2007). Once people get mindshare, they get offers. The top you tubers, twitch streamers, etc have negotiated contracts with terms that are very different that what a standard creator has.
Think of it just like Hollywood. The top talents are sough after and franchises are built around them, the rest have to audition.
The same is true of YouTube if you heavily scrutinize your subscription list.
It’s extremely annoying because there are pockets of communities that remind me of the Internet before the masses trashed it and everything was centralized around a handful of sites. I’ve been playing with Mastodon lately and that reminds me more of the 90s Internet.
If I'm interested in a subject / person, I try to both read about it and listen video about it / from him. I found that the two information sources are often complementary.
I'm not suggesting you change your personal choice, but as someone who is a sometimes member of those communities, I resent being called trash.
When you paint a medium or platform with a broad brush, and chastise them for not censoring it to your liking, you should at least check the alternative you're recommending is at least as censorial.
It's really not any different than what Netflix is doing now, right?
Discounting SEO, the major issue was that they didn't build their own ad network. You set up business in Google's front yard and didn't like it when they told you to get out.
The ad network (or rather the monetization model) is the hardest part of building a video sharing site. If that part wasn't figured out then it's hard for me to believe you were actually serious about building a content network.
Given how much this guy cried about how much money he is "owed" I'm less likely to believe he was slighted and more likely to believe he was a greedy exec who was in over his head.
> he walked away with about $50 million when News Corp purchased my space. He should have walked away with a lot more
He thinks that News Corp should have paid more for myspace? Because they got so much value from it.
I think Peertube and other Fediverse stacks like Mastodon, Pleroma, Pixelfed & Lemmy will continue to bleed users from more traditional sites over the next few years. They've significantly lowered the barriers to running your own social site, creating a great variety of communities that otherwise would be much smaller or non-existent.
If you stream 5min clips, that's 1200 clips for 1 euro. There should be enough ad networks that offer 2 euro CPM to make a profit.
On the other hand, how can they make a profit if nobody is discovering their site?
[0] https://hetzner.de
[1] https://superuser.com/questions/434532/what-data-transfer-ra...
1200 views for 1 euro, that's 1000 eur for a million views. On top of that YouTube's rates of paying creators are in the same ballpark at 1k/million views.
So yeah your ad model needs be paying 2k+ per million views ( any one more familiar with the ad industry know the real value made curiously? ) on a video or your screwed
But it's not. Your example is contrived, as Hetzner likely doesn't expect you to stream a 100 hours of 1080p HD content to 100 people simultaneously. Your users would have a laughably bad experience at scale. On a single box, it's unlikely you could max out your throughput - you could at most support 45 users on a single Hetzner node (1080p @ 22Mbps on a Gigabit connection in the best case).
If you are going to be serving content with any level of seriousness you need a CDN. 1TB of bandwidth on Cloudfront costs $87. Akamai charges $100-$150. Thats 100x than 1 euro/TB you initially priced out.
With a 1Gig connection you can only serve ~45 concurrents streaming 1080p. If you wanted to support more than 45 concurrents, you would need
1. To distribute content to separate instances
2. A routing infrastructure to reliably route connections to that content.
And then, congrats, you have just built your own CDN - albeit in one datacenter. If you don't want your users on the other side of the country constantly complaining that your site is slow compared to Vimeo, you would have to build it on the other side as well.
If you believe your hodgepodge CDN is going to be much cheaper than Cloudfront (on the order of 1 Euro/month, where you could support it on ~1.5M views/month), then you should probably skip the whole video sharing nonsense, and get rich becoming a CDN provider :)
If you believe otherwise, please enlighten me on how you can build a HD video streaming service for 100 concurrents without a CDN. Like I mentioned, on a 1GbE connection, you can serve a theoretical max of 45 users on one node. Where do you go from there without something that looks like CDN?
https://fortune.com/2016/10/18/youtube-profits-ceo-susan-woj...
That's kind of the point. Using Monopoly power in one industry (advertisement or search) to cripple a competitor in another (video) is kind of the definition of anti-competitive behavior.
Google has been stung and made to show search results in an unbiased way with relation to their products. While it happened in the past the current monopoly, anticompetitive, antitrust commission in Europe California and some awaking Asian countries prevent that kind of behavior
That is the crux of antitrust/monopoly protection commission. The reason the exist
OK but this story begins in 2006. At that time there basically was only Google for generating significant traffic. Facebook was growing and Twitter had just launched but neither had the size of audience (or real ad products) to generate the type of traffic Google could
These people where on reddit up until recently you just never visited the subs that got banned. It took some loud squealing to make the admins do something, then the result was way worse. It made the "disgusting trash sites" and the people that use them more vigilant that why none are really growing.
Then a bunch of subreddits got banned and more quarantined. They labelled those who subscribed to a quarantined as a "community" and not just something you subbed to.
Now any subreddit you "join" and "leave" and they have dropped the subscribe/unsubscribe wording further enforcing the isolated community angle of invested enthusiasts rather than the casual subscriber to random things. Now if you subscribe to some random subreddit you can be viewed as agreeing with all its postings and viewpoints where previously people wouldn't think this way about using the site.
Things won't grow as they are aopealing to the hardcore focus users rather than the casual ones. Any competition would do well to appeal to the more casual and disconnected users.
"Get up, stand up, don't give up the fight!"
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
From your source (emphasis mine):
> Providers of [..] online search engines should not be required to disclose the detailed functioning of their ranking mechanisms, including algorithms, under this Regulation. [..]
> A general description of the main ranking parameters should safeguard [against bad faith manipulation of ranking by third parties]
Main parameters being defined as:
> The notion of main parameter should be understood to refer to any general criteria, processes, specific signals incorporated into algorithms or other adjustment or demotion mechanisms used in connection with the ranking.
So for example, you make metube.com and it shows up on all the search engines. Off the top of my head, maybe it watches the rank over time, kind of like a stock ticker. If Google detects metube.com and buries your listing, but the listing stays the same on more egalitarian search engines like duckduckgo.com, that would show as a divergence in the historical rankings.
So you could get answers like "there's a 77% likelihood that Google buried your link" or "Google's result diverges 23% from other search engines" or something like that.
Then an overall measure of the top million sites or whatever could be used to generate an overall fairness/bias rating.
If it showed enough manipulation over a long enough time, maybe that would be grounds to regulate or break up the largest search engines. Or maybe the law wouldn't be necessary, because a browser plugin could say "there's a 95% chance that this search result has not been manipulated" or even request results with a high degree of manipulation as a way of finding the canonical truth.
Hmmm that gives me an idea for a search engine...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8174763.stm
https://techcrunch.com/2015/04/16/microsoft-and-yahoo-renew-...
You would need to go to the country-specific search engines like Yandex and Baidu, which may not be that great for english or US-based content.
I read the first couple of paragraphs and between the rantings how he should be a multimillionaire and how Google will destroy all of his projects, I gave up.
It is obviously a very emotional subject for Trent, but that's just not the best way to present what happened to a third party.
Live Video was a more successful video platform in the mid 2000s until Google bought YouTube and leveraged their monopoly on search and ads to cut off traffic to Live Video. They also paid content creators to leave Live Video and sign exclusive contracts with the cash Google injected to the company. The only reason Justin TV survived is that they pivoted to gaming to avoid competing with YouTube.
I admire the spirit. It's right up there with lets see who we can attack....hmm...US military...yeah they seem about the right size as a worthy opponent.
So to compete and beat facebook and google one has to be good at the ad game not just the content game.
Whoever thought google will allow a competitor to use google’s own platform to grow and threaten their own video ad stream should probs not be in a company’s board for a while.
Also, Google Videos was Google's own YouTube competitor from before they bought YouTube, which arguably was anti-competitive because it was much easier to search for Google Videos from Google than for YouTube videos.
The more likely explanation for why their search rank plummited is their shady backlinking between their properties.
> The only one that survived was Justin. That eventually became twitch because they picked video games as a category and just eliminated everything else. And YouTube didn’t really go after one market like that. They went after all video on the internet, so Google let them kind of have video games and that was it.
Their explanation for why Twitch succeeded doesn't hold water. My understanding is that video gaming is currently one of the most popular categories on YouTube today and probably has been since the beginning (e.g. PewDiePie started as a video gaming youtuber). They're directly going after Twitch with YouTube Gaming. And Twitch obviously hasn't been deplatformed by Google Search.
But you're right - there are lots of players who carved out niches on the market to be profitable, since hosting video content is expensive. Vimeo, Twitch, even LiveLeak, cater to specific content while the generalist Youtube burned money for over a decade. When all the other generalists were pivoting, LiveVideo plowed ahead with something that wasn't profitable. This post-hoc rationalization and finger pointing feels like sour grapes.
They haven't improved. Google's app store is still called "Google Play," which doesn't tell anyone it's an app store. It sounds like something gaming-related, and that's it. Google Plus... need we go on?
YouTube was a simply better product. As was Facebook compared to mySpace.
The innovative features weren't the right ones. YouTube may not have had them but ultimately in the market today we haven't got those features that seemed such a good idea at the time. Just because you can do clever stuff, e.g. showing multiple streams, doesn't mean that is what people want.
The content was better on YouTube unless you really did want porn. It is not a problem Google paying people to do content for their platform in exclusive deals. They had pockets deep enough to do such things and this investment has paid off.
Sure the startup with $50 million isn't going to be able to just sign up all of the big names but they also were not going to be able to pay as well as Google when it came to monetisation since they were going with adSense. Had they developed something special when it came to ad sales then they could have been on to something.
Then in the search results there is no reason to believe Google were doing anything shady. The shadiest part could be the way Youtube was built for SEO. Every developer wants good SEO so it is only natural to try and excel in this area. Within YouTube they potentially had a better idea of how the Google search engine works so they could have written their front end to specifically game the system. I doubt they did that to a level beyond what outside developers can achieve.
Hmm ok. Are you sure that was the only reason?
All those organic links from those 74 million of websites do not disappear even if you do disappear from the search results.
The mention that google executives contacted them to discuss the $3,000 a month he could of made if he ran google ads - that is genuinely peanuts. This makes me think that was a really small operation that didn't have a hope in hell in going big and competing with vimeo or dailymotion, let alone google. For comparison I was running an AdSense site around the same time and was easily clearing £800-1000 (approx $1500 I guess) a month with only about 150,000-200,000 visits/month (CPMs were higher in those days - I get about the same traffic now but only about £150-300 a month now)
If you these google "executives" (p.s. these wont have been "executives" wasting their time on a tiny publisher like this, you'd be lucky to even get a call from an actual google employee at that size - any tiny publisher deals like this would be farmed out to third party "partner" companies... the real actual executives would be talking to the New York Timess/Conde nasts/ESPNs of the world where the serious money is worth their time) are suggesting you could get up to $3,000 a month then sorry you were never destined for the big time.
Sounds like those 74 million (74,000,000 sites linking to you - that is loads) sites sending traffic your way were actually only sending in a trickle of users otherwise you'd be able to sell a lot of advertising. Even if each site only sent a single measly user per month, 74,000,000 visitors a month is a chunky visitor base and would easily net you more than $3,000 - even with a CPM of 25c ("good" publishers can expect rates well in excess of this - easily $1 and perhaps $3,4 or even 5 for really top-tier stuff) you'd be looking at about $18,500 a month. You'd easily be able to do direct deals with advertisers and get better CPMs at that sort of level.
Start ups fail all the time. It is hard and it is sad but I don't like it when people don't accept responsibility for their own failures though. This attitude of "it was everyone's fault apart from mine!" annoys me a lot
It is not possible to compete with Google using Google-like business model. It is already being used by Google and Google is very good at it.
Who manages to compete with Google using a slightly different business model? Facebook. Why? Different USP. Different product.
Who else? Amazon. Why? Different USP, different product.
Who else? Pornhub. Why? Different USP, different product.
List goes on.