
Ask HN: Did we get bait and switched by YouTube? - abacadaba
Overnight, Youtube app on Roku doubled the number of ads it shows per video.<p>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&#x27;re free to ramp up revenue to where they can make a profit?<p>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?
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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

