
How I tried to compete with YouTube and Google with Livevideo.com - mysticlabs
https://techpost.io/why-you-cant-compete-with-google-the-deplatforming-of-livevideo-com/
======
privateSFacct
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.

~~~
devmunchies
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”.

~~~
tasty_freeze
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.

------
yongjik
> 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.

~~~
blueboo
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.

~~~
yongjik
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.

~~~
the-rc
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).

------
maxk42
Without revealing details -- I worked for this company at this time. I was
privy to certain financial details.

Google did not destroy them. A combination of poor business decisions and
possibly corruption did. I watched these decisions unfold in person and I
won't provide certain details because I don't want to say anything that might
be considered libelous, but this guy is straight-up throwing a pity party for
himself. It has nothing to do with reality.

Google was not actually evil back then. Did they offer contracts to content
creators? Maybe. No reason Live Universe couldn't have done the same.

There actually was lots of adult content on the Live Universe network of
sites. Just -- everywhere. Content moderation was ineffective because so much
of the community was driven by porn: Users wouldn't flag adult content because
that's what they were there for, so massive amounts of it just piled up.
Google had every reason to stop doing business with them.

This guy straight-up admits there was child porn on the site and they were
engaged in shady SEO tactics then bitches that Google delisted them.

"I literally [built a YouTube competitor" \-- no you didn't, man. You were
just an employee for someone who did.

~~~
heimatau
> they were engaged in shady SEO tactics then bitches that Google delisted
> them.

As someone who did SEO for many years, Google was very serious about
eliminating the 'black hat' SEO tactics. They were cheap, they were plentiful.
Google eliminated them throughout their index because bad actors were skewing
the results. This article does sound like a pity party but it sounds like
someone isn't willing to accept they dropped the ball when it was passed to
them.

------
tptacek
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).

~~~
defen
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).

~~~
magicalist
> _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)

------
nosefrog
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.

~~~
bduerst
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.

~~~
nostromo
This was 2006. LiveLeak wasn't a thing yet when LiveVideo launched.

------
mooman219
> It wasn’t it wasn’t anything nefarious.

> 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.

~~~
mysticlabs
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.

------
TACIXAT
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.

~~~
friedegg
I think we will eventually see VideoHub or something along those lines with a
similar hosting platform from the PornHub company, just for non-porn.

~~~
earenndil
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.

~~~
JD557
>They'll try to separate the brands

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.

------
LearnerHerzog
I would think the interface/front-end would be the most obvious and important
way to catch the attention of visitors when competing against any decent-sized
online company; I have never heard of livevideo.com, but at very first glance,
I am certain it was never a threat on google/youtube's radar even if you had
the best backend system in the world.

No offense, but it looks like a 1990s yahoo.com version of youtube, and that
introductory how-to video is already way more than enough to lose the
attention of the majority viewers. A search engine landing page with more
words/distractions from the search bar than google.com has (even a fraction of
a second longer than what people expect) is already a red flag. Similarly, a
streaming site must have extremely uniform, visually stimulating, well defined
and relatable content for any hope of keeping visitors interested at a
fraction of the rate youtube does. Consider how even the cheapest of porn
websites (an industry with tens of millions of competing and ever-improving
video streaming websites) know to float uniform rows of well tested, clickable
video thumbnails as the first thing one sees, along with any and all
instructions/options compressed onto a single dropdown button in the top
corner— sometimes they don't even show the title unless you hover over it.

My point is you have to figure out a way to make it even more accessible to
new visitors than google is to their non-new visitors; and the amount of
front-end text, options, and non-uniform content on livevideo.com is several
leagues behind where it would need to start to consider a plan of attack...
even against YT or the googs 10 years ago, circa 2009

~~~
mysticlabs
Not sure which 2006-2008 you lived through, but this was pretty standard web
design back then. YouTube from 2007:
[https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/timeline/youtube-2007](https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/timeline/youtube-2007)

Had the company been allowed to exist and compete fairly, it would have
evolved into something more modern and mobile friendly. Judging a startup from
before the pre-mobile era, and blaming the design for its failure is kind of
silly.

This was the norm back then, if I were creating a video sharing website in
2019 of course I'd approach it differently, but alas there's no point in even
trying.

------
mattlondon
> 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

~~~
mysticlabs
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.

------
cryptica
>> You know, I should be a multimillionaire right now like we should have been
what YouTube is today or at least a major competitor of YouTube and we should
be a multibillion dollar Unicorn Tech Company.

I find this statement extremely arrogant. It incorrectly assumes that the
value and quality of a product is correlated with the financial success of the
product. It hasn't been the case for decades. To everyone outside of the elite
'I used to go to MIT and was an early employee of MySpace' crowd, this was
always the case and it's not news at all.

When I build a product, I assume that there is a 90% to 99% probability that
it's going to fail and I know exactly why it's going to fail and it will have
nothing to do with product quality or strategy. I just assume that I'll have
to build many exceptional products to even get a shot at making a living out
of one of them. I expect success to be completely random and inexplicable.

There are many superior products and technologies around but nobody talks
about them and they are not being built upon. Everyone only talks about the
mediocre tech that comes out of Google, Facebook, Amazon, or the elite Silicon
Valley VC startup funnel.

I enjoy reading these kinds of articles about elites getting a dose of the
highly centralized monopolistic reality that they and their friends helped to
create (e.g. especially those about Foursquare founders whining about Google
over and over) - They're getting a taste of their own poison IMO. And yes, if
you used to go to MIT, Stanford or Harvard or were on the founding team of
MySpace, you are part of the elite; you have no excuse to complain, you are in
the 'in crowd'; you could just have called the right people to make your
problems go away; you failed to do that. Most people don't even have the
option to socially network their problems away.

But by all means keep whining; at least when elites whine, maybe other elites
and politicians are more likely to listen.

------
on_and_off
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.

~~~
deckar01
Summary of claims from the interview:

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.

------
ryanobjc
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.

------
billpg
I had a LiveVideo account. I had made a (terrible) music video made from clips
of my driving around and sped up. I put it on my YouTube, but they ended up
over-compressing the video so it was all blurry. (Fast-moving clips don't
compress very well.)

At the time, some fairly medium-to-high prominence YouTubers (back when Peter
Oakley/Geriatric1927 was the most popular channel) had moved to LiveVideo so I
tried uploading my video there. They didn't re-compress it all and it was
still high quality.

Time passed, and YouTube changed their rules to not compress so much. I re-
uploaded my video (having to make a small change to avoid the hash collision)
and it stayed up.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hg2gjrUFx9c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hg2gjrUFx9c)

------
notyourday
The product had no USP. And it was a suckier product. That's it.

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.

------
sjg007
I mean Twitch succeeded so that's a counterpoint. Vimeo is still going.. If I
were to start a video company today, I'd go mobile first.

~~~
on_and_off
Dailymotion is still there as well (although I find their product really
inferior to the competitors)

------
zackmorris
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.

Hmmm that gives me an idea for a search engine...

~~~
judge2020
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:

[http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8174763.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8174763.stm)

[https://techcrunch.com/2015/04/16/microsoft-and-yahoo-
renew-...](https://techcrunch.com/2015/04/16/microsoft-and-yahoo-renew-search-
allian/)

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.

------
jaimex2
My thoughts on this:

Did Livevideo offer anything new or different to what Youtube already had? Was
it better than Youtube in any way?

We shouldn't forget Google couldn't compete with Youtube either. Google had to
buy Youtube because Googlevideo was not as good.

Twitch found a way to compete just fine.

~~~
mysticlabs
Yes. It had live video, and live streaming in 2007 that is better than what
YouTube even offers today. LiveVideo.com had way more features than YouTube
even has today.

Justin.tv which eventually became Twitch actually struggled and almost failed
before they were able to capture the live streaming gaming market.

------
idonotknowwhy
57 matches for "You know" in that transcript. I got about half way through but
can't finish this, it's so annoying!

------
dangerboysteve
And he posted his video to YouTube. The irony.

------
aexol
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:

"Get up, stand up, don't give up the fight!"

[https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...](https://eur-
lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:32019R1150&from=EN)

~~~
aexol
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

~~~
itcrowd
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.

~~~
aexol
It's the first step. If everybody will report criminal behavior( if seen ) of
some of Tech Giants, then we can move this mountain.

------
Havoc
>Compete 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.

------
pcdoodle
Thanks for posting this! The screenshots of the platform look awesome.

------
jdtang13
The article is 90% delusional

~~~
idonotknowwhy
It feels like it's 90% "you know,"

------
mgamache
I am not sure if the stories are accurate, but if they are this is exactly the
kind of anti-trust activity that Microsoft was prosecuted for (under US law).
This is extending market power (monopoly) from one area to another (search and
ads to video streaming). I know it looks like some of the startups broke some
'rules' like porn or pedophilia, but really YouTube breaks the same rules and
uses the same (flagging/review) technique used in some of the startups. It's
hard to start anything web related without a good Google index. Google has 93%
market share in search [[http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-
share](http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share)]

------
harperlee
> (...) is just like, I don’t know, like maybe half of the features (...)

Some editing would be great to readability.

------
learnstats2
"And the only reason we’re not is because of anti competitive behavior from
Google."

I closed at this point.

I'm no fan of Google, but if your business fails, I expect there to be some
self-reflection.

------
AndrewWarner
Is there a link to the audio download somewhere?

I can’t see it, but Id like to listen to this instead of reading it

~~~
jpeg_hero
[https://overcast.fm/+SJPJ9ok9U](https://overcast.fm/+SJPJ9ok9U)

------
FabHK
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?

------
barli
you didn't try to compete against Youtube and Google, you had an early vision
of Periscope and House Party. Do you still have access to MySpace guys?

~~~
mysticlabs
Not really.

I could maybe track down Toan, I still check in with his brother occasionally.
But Brad is in the wind, tried to track him down but it seems he doesn't want
to be found.

------
jackjeff
Wow... what a ton of BS. I disagree with most of it.

\- "Google/YouTube made an anti-competitive move against LiveVideo". Ok, on
the face of it (if you believe everything Lapinsky says) then it is really
bad, as in "illegal" kind of bad. It makes me wonder how Google/Youtube
avoided being sued. I whole heartily condemn YouTube/Google _IF_ they did
this. It sounds plausible btw, since they have done jerk things to Yelp or
flight search engines, etc...

\- "There is child porn on YouTube". Really? I don't believe it. They do a
very good job with regular porn. I have never seen a pair of boobs on YouTube
over the years. I don't know how they do it, but it seems to me that
moderation of "nakedness" probably using AI works pretty damn well. I have
never seen an article about porn issues on YouTube.

\- "Google is no longer a neutral digital intermediate because they promote
fairness". Yes. They do. And if they were not doing it, governments around the
world would force them to do it. Also their advertisers do not want to be
associated with the likes of Alex Jones and are putting pressure on YouTube to
sort the issue. This is the sad reality, but Google, Facebook and Twitter are
forced to moved from a "neutral" digital platform to something more akin to a
"publisher". People on the board of Google are no more elected that the
directors of publication of the largest newspapers. And if you think that
shows an anti-conservatice bias, look at who is President of the US, who is
going to be Prime Minister in the UK, etc... I don't think this is going to be
easy but Google (and social media) to find a right balance where most people
are able to publish, but the most fringe/toxic members of the community
deserved to be demonetized. Will Google abuse its powers of f//k up from time
to time? Sure they will. But I agree with the overall trend. And again, they
do not have a choice.

\- "Google changed its search engine to promote sites with responsive
designs". I absolutely agree with the change. Most people use mobile devices.
You waited until 2013 to realize you _had_ to do that? A website that is not
responsive today and back in 2013 probably sucked anyway, and it is "right"
for Google to demote them. There is nothing anti-competitive about that. Btw,
I can predict the future too. For instance, at some point Google will promote
sites that support HTTP/2 and not just HTTP/1.1, so maybe you think of doing
that on your next "Wordpress business".

\- "Google wanted ads on my website". Just say "no". And I don't believe in
the logical fallacy that _because_ you refused that is why the website was
delisted. Seriously dude, your website was _way to small_ for Google to care
that much.

\- The business was overly dependent on Google search results. Google tweak
its algorithm from time to time. Most of the time Google has genuine reasons
for the changes. Sometimes they want to demote a "large" competitor in an
anti-competitive move (which btw, I think it's going to get harder and harder
for Google to get away with that). But your tiny site that depends on search
results... it's just an unintended consequence. Google does _not_ care about
you. And if you get most of your sales from Google, your business model is
highly volatile and can disappear overnight. I don't want Google to stop
making tweaks to improve the quality of results and destroy dark SEO hacks,
just because occasionally they happen to accidentally destroys someones under-
diversified business model. I am sure it sucks to be on the receiving end of
this, but imagine a world where Google _never_ tweaked the algorithm. Search
results would be utterly worthless today.

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otakucode
I don't think that even if Google avoided the tactics they used, you still
could not compete with YouTube. Alphabet has as one of its goals cultural
"guidance". This is openly advocated by Eric Schmidt in his book 'A New
Digital Age.' They ran YouTube at a gigantic ongoing loss for over a decade
solely to suppress competition and establish themselves as the only viable
video platform. If you can build a billion-dollar infrastructure, and after
those bills are paid you can lose hundreds of millions of dollars a year
running it, than and only then can you compete with YouTube and face these
tactics in addition to all of the legal and political pressure Google can
produce. They haven't even needed to break out political pressure (and by that
I mean getting government to establish regulations and legislation that
YouTube is omitted from by being grandfathered in, not any kind of
'conservative/liberal bias' sort of thing) yet. And so long as Alphabet is
profitable, we may never see those tactics as they're simply not needed.

YouTube is a key factor in Alphabet exercising the cultural 'guidance' that
Eric Schmidt argues is not only Googles responsibility but moral obligation.
For people who agree with Schmidt and disagree with the position that the
public should be permitted to decide their own future, good or bad, it will be
impossible to gain their support. Make no mistake, that viewpoint is the one
that has supported every monarchy, dictatorship, theocracy, and non-democratic
social structure throughout history. Political scientists call is Conservatism
with a capital C, whereas the view that the public should play a role in their
own governance and decide their own fate, for good or ill, is the alternative
that drove the American Revolution, French Revolution, and countless blood-
soaked revolutions across the globe. It won every single one of those wars.
But it, too, lost to Google.

Just consider, if 70+% of the public today believed that interracial marriage
was offensive and disgusting, which was true when interracial marriage was
legalized by the Supreme Court in the 1960s, Google would deplatform anyone
who agreed with the legalization of interracial marriage in order to defend
that status quo. They do not seek to provide an open, global platform that can
host or play a part in public debate about serious issues. They seek to
exercise cultural guidance as Eric Schmidt sees fit. It has been the public
which has reliably improved over time and progressed while still containing
contingents of nuts and extremists. And it has progressed not despite that,
but because of it. No closed and centrally managed society in history has
become more progressive except through dreadfully bloody revolutions that
destroyed its management.

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baalimago
Yes, you know, I know.

Maybe do some filtering on the autotranscripts? Interesting read otherwise.

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fabioyy
Google is Tier 1, they don't pay bandwidth. no one can compete with them

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quocble
Im glad to see more of this. You can learn a lot more from failures which
arent discussed well online.

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alexanderklein
Very good article. Yes, Google is indeed a very strong competitor for
startups.

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trilila
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.

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ilostit12
Wow! Google needs to be broken up.

