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Ask HN: Did we get bait and switched by YouTube?

7 points by abacadaba ↗ HN
Overnight, Youtube app on Roku doubled the number of ads it shows per video.

Is this the digital equivalent of dumping? Where offering the service with no ads, then a few ads, locked us all in and killed any competition until their moat was insurmountable. And now that there is no viable competition they're free to ramp up revenue to where they can make a profit?

Should it be regulated as such? I realize this business model is certainly not unique to Youtube, but should offering a service unprofitably be treated any differently than say selling steel below cost until all the other producers are forced to close?

5 comments

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PaulHoule
I think one problem they have had is not enough advertisers. So you see the same ad over and over and over again...

That for one thing limits how many ads you can see. Once they scale that side up they can show more ads.

yorwba
YouTube did not actually kill their competition. Other sites may not have the videos you're looking for, but that's not due to lock-in. Creators can upload their videos to multiple sites without losing their original audience. They'd certainly do that if ads on YouTube became unbearable.
iforgotpassword
I'm not really a fan of Google to say the least, and there's been several bad moves by YouTube in the past but I'm generally wondering how anyone but Google and a few other big players could run a site of that scale. They support 8k video. Anything being uploaded has to be transcoded to a dozen different formats and stored forever, immediately accessible. Even with the increased amount of ads today I cannot understand how this can ever make money considering the amount of resources required. So I'm generally fine with the amount of ads considering the quality of content I get in return. Whether those creators get properly treated is another question though, but apparently it's not painful enough for them to leave.
abacadaba
Ya I mean I'll probably pony up for the ad free version eventually, doesn't mean I can't be salty about it.

Up till now I've always found the ads to be perfectly reasonable, I'm just scared where it's heading. Don't cable tv my youtube.

qzx_pierri
> Don't cable tv my youtube. Even if they try, they’ll fail. We’ll always have a new trick up our sleeves. We have coding/scripting to back us up. Cable TV was different because you had no other choice but to take in the brainwashing/ads