I agree with just about all you said, but don't understand the point of that comment.
So what if Google makes plenty of money? Does that mean they don't have a right to make more? Or they are evil if they try and therefore, deserve to be neglected or even cheated out of more?
And who is defining "plenty"? "Plenty" is a relative term. Alphabet/Google is way down the list of biggest corporations compared to Walmart, Saudi Aramco, Amazon, China National Petroleum, Apple, UnitedHealth and several others. Even CVS Health is bigger than them. (
source)
YouTube is so popular because people like it. Is that YouTube's fault?
Well then, I guess that settles it. If that's free, then anyone can simply host their own CDN and enjoy their content ad free.
It does exist on TV. A few months ago, my brother and his metal band were invited to take part in a talent show. The contract they offered said that they waive any rights to their own content to the TV company. They took the contract to a lawyer despite being asked by the TV company not to, who advised them to refuse signing it at all costs, so naturally, they did.
Let me tackle all of this together.
1) Google is already making a ton of money, and has no right to make any. You are confusing rights with imperatives. Funny that you should BS the terminology...but I'm going to just state that they are not stating this as a requirement...but using it to force engagement...selectively.
2) To that selectively bit...let me answer the "free" and "rights" argument. Both are idiotic, because of how Youtube is actually acting. When a creator gets to roll adds and get paid they throw up the "you are violating the terms" warning. If you get a demonitized video it's not even a consideration. That friends, is BS. It's acknowledging that what they are doing with infrastructure has no cost unless the content creator wants to get paid. You're welcome to argue, but the proof is in their actions.
3) America's Funniest Home Videos was a TV show. It ran for years, and was hosted by the guy who did Full House. In the 80's to 90's people competed by turning over the rights to their videos...for 10k. I'm not even going to touch on Tosh.0 or any of the garbage that exists now, but it's a tactic that is not by any stretch of the imagination new.
4) "People like it" is a stupid argument. I like watching TV...and right now the TV in my house is OTA. Yep, commercials are good. I can watch Star Trek constantly because there's a station that paid for the broadcast rights, shoves in commercials, and makes a profit by having the commercials cost more than the content they purchase. Cool.
5) Would I be pissed if the TV company suddenly chained me to a chair while the commercials played? Yep. What is Youtube doing? Well, Alphabet scrapes my data and sells it to people who want to sell me crap. I go to websites, get a bunch of pop-ups, and tolerate them. I am fine with this...because at the end of the day it's allowed Alphabet to do stupid crap. Hangouts, glass, gmail, and stadia to name a few. Note 75% of those services no longer exist...because Google doesn't really design things for people. They design data collection...and branch out to interesting stuff occasionally. So...for the last decade Google has been fine, fought to be a safe harbor for the DMCA (very expensive), hosted things from all over the political spectrum...and is now changing. Instead of making the same amount of money, they now want you to pay for that privilege. No, this doesn't come with anything new. In fact, it's now supporting the vestiges of the cocaine fueled music recording industry...which is just funny considering that Google in part helped to fuel the transition of music to a service along with Apple...which killed that golden cow. All of this should now obviously link back to why forced commercials is a stupid way to support an already profitable venture which is primarily driven by content that you do not have any investment in.
If you'd like to see a scenario where any of this makes sense, I'll gladly offer it.
1) Google stops filtering video results. I don't like Mr. Beast, so I can turn him off. Each channel gets one primary topic, a secondary topic, and a tertiary topic. Each has 20 values for each category. 20^3 = 8000 potential channel combinations. If there are a million channels, each would average to 125 channels. Filter for languages...and you have a manageable amount of topics to sift through when you want to search for things to watch, combined with key word filters.
2) Google stops playing politics. Period. Free speech is great and it sucks. It means you have to listen to the anti-semitic garbage, the racism, and all of the hate. It also means you get something like Blazing Saddles. Free speech is not a choice, if you aren't going to pay most of your content creators.
3) Commit to flat fees for your creators. If Bob down the street gets 800 views give him nothing (your infrastructure cost is theoretically what you offer), but Sally who decided to question the efficacy of anti-racism laws which act as discriminatory racism gets 1 million make sure she gets something...other than a demonitization for covering a controversy.
4) Put into place a two tier payment system. $3 a month for add free, $0 a month with a maximum 20% commercials (similar to current US TV standards, where a 30 minute block is 24 minutes of show).
5) Ban any inter-video commercials, or paid advertisements inside video. This is because creators are guaranteed money, and should not need this.
6) Scale video length to payment. A million hits on an hour of video should be worth more than a 2 minute reaction video. Don't just be video length though...be engagement time. Reward investment, not output volume.
7) Support creators. Create a royalty free library of visuals and audio. Tell the old media to shove it in as polite a manner as possible, but to shove it none the less.
8) Advertise everything, and don't skimp. Have your advertisements match with the topics. In this way a channel about cars would see advertisements for things like wax, and medical channels might see commercials for new medicines. Slide the scale for pricing of advertisements to how volatile a subject is, so companies can match their target audience to a risk-reward...as very popular stuff like Mr. Beast might not be the place to see an advertisement for something like Ashley Madison (a cheating website)... or it might be perfect. In this way price, engagement, and target market are controlled by the buyer and thus not your responsibility.
9) Use your data. Project the balance of $36 a year customers to free ones...and aim for profitability. 90%-10% sounds a bit high, but at this point nearly everything is automated. 10% profits for literally nothing is huge...when Disney, HBO, and Netflix are stuffing millions into projects to build a content library to justify people paying for their services at multiple times your price.
10) Wrap all of this up by not having a music subscription attached. Allow it to be purchased separately....instead of sneaking it in to "justify the price" of that which was once supported at no apparent cost.
Why put so much effort forward. Anecdote time. I used to live in a neighborhood with MS execs and Sony execs. When the Napster thing was going down, one of them asked me why I stole music. He was a bit of a jerk, and had been drinking. I told him that I'd never stolen music...and he said that downloading music was stealing money from his pocket, and he should just make up for it by not paying me. I had just spent a week working for him...and said ok and left. I walked outside, tore out half of what I'd done, and went home. He later called my parents, irate, and threatening legal action. Not really a midwest thing...so they agreed to talk to me. I told them what he said, told them that if I was going to pay for the stuff, then be told he wouldn't pay me for anything because I stole from him, without ever knowing me, that I was going to give him the half of a job that the last CD I purchased was. My parents dragged me up to their house, demanded that he pay me for the stuff, and suggested that legal action against a minor for doing work illegally paid under the table was a lawsuit they'd be willing to take...to which the bitter bastard forked over a hundred dollar bill. His wife came home later that day, and was amazed about the state of what was beautiful the day before. She wandered down to our house, and asked what the heck happened. My parents told her, then suggested that she leave. She apologized immediately, explaining that they'd missed their bonus and instead of 20+ million dollars they were only going to get 5. I heard the words...then did the math in my head. 15,000,000 divided by about 1000 was 15,000 kids he'd have had to screw out of money for services to pay back what he perceived he was "owed."
Now, let me do the math on this one. Average of about $15 for a CD...they were assuming that in that half of a year 1 million CDs were stolen leading potential sales to decrease by that amount. Can you say that with a straight face..? I know it wasn't a 1:1 loss of 15 million in bonus...because not meeting a 2 million target by getting 1,999,999 would also lead to that...but that's just silly. It was even sillier that he'd have assumed he could make that money up by stiffing somebody on payment for less than 1% of that value...because he'd also seen piracy numbers in that same presentation and made the link that it was entirely responsible.
Why does any of this long anecdote matter? The recording industry is known to have made profit hand over fist...and their content creators are often spending months on the road inside of a cramped bus, trying to get sleep before they're shoved out onto stage to promote their latest CD release...which they'll never see any profit from unless it sells thousands of millions of copies. The recording industry has the infrastructure to record...and it has largely paid all of this off decades ago. It has the infrastructure to print CDs...which can now be done with a cheap computer at home. It has the ability to make stars...only "it used to" is probably a better conjugation there. Let's compare that to Google. If they let you be monetized, you can potentially generate a constant stream of content for them which pays literally pennies despite advertisers paying a lot to Youtube. That's great from the idea of "it's their infrastructure," but not great when you get to the point that a system already paying for itself handily is deciding to make more money.
Yada...yada....cocaine fueled music industry joke...yada....yada.
So no, I think that Google is repeating the absolutely bat crap crazy shenanigans that the recording industry did, where making just a few more dollars is the difference between tolerable and actively encouraging stealing. As I've gotten older, I have downloaded music. If after a listen I like it, I buy it. If not, I delete it. I'm sitting on a collection of movies that I've illegally transcoded so that I can watch them on my phone, because I paid for a copy of the content rather than the rights to a plastic disc. I think it was amazing that, for a time, companies actually acknowledged this and provided slightly more expensive movies with both disc and streaming rights (but then gag because it was account locked and a certain time after print they'd actually no longer allow registering so that "bargain bin" copies were screwed out of that ability).
This might be complicated, but the simple answer is Google being "a little bit" more greedy is not a conversation starter. Greed is not good. Google is not entitled to taking content and making it their with literally no compensation to the creators "because it's controversial" while they make money...which is why we are rolling through that double standard of paid and unpaid content with and without add blocking. If that isn't enough to signal that this is a bad move, then you are invested in Google's monetary success more than their success long term. Congrats, you're either an investor or somebody at Google who forgot "don't be evil" disappeared from your corporate goals.
But that's another discussion.
