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Ask HN: What do you think would happen if Google and YouTube split?
26 points by Gemdation 35 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 77 comments
Technologically speaking, what things would break? Right now, I think of two services that would be impacted: ∙ Google TV/YouTube Movies & TV libraries ∙ YouTube Music's catalog

Sorry for not exactly understanding how both work, this is just more of what I asked in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41946885




It wouldn't be the work of a couple of hours and changing DNS records. Youtube runs on Google hardware in Google datacenters running proprietary Google software that integrates throughout the Google proprietary ecosystem. Everything will break.

Realistically, once the division is somehow negotiated through, Youtube will have to find a way to make enough money to support its operations, and would find itself in the same bind that every other video site has hit in terms of balancing adoption with income.

The only barrier they will not have to face is competing against Youtube, the big free elephant in the room.


Not just data centers, a world wide network with servers in POPs in like every city in the world, and peering with every residential network in the world (and cache nodes on them)


I've always assumed that Google ads subsidises everything else at Google. So my concern with a split would be YouTube increasing price or less investment in the service.


Youtube just had the revenue of $8.92 billion where the total was $88.27 billion. Not a small number. Is there any information how much is profit from that Youtube part?


There are no numbers on YouTube costs (which would be astronomical), and IMO it's unlikely YouTube is profitable on its own.


Any idea about costs and volume (traffic) over at Netflix, to compare apples with oranges?


I have a hard time imagining that youtube is subsidized given the ridiculous number of obnoxious ads you're forced to watch and the steep price of removing them. Surely if they were subsidized this wouldn't be worth the cost of ruining their product.


The steep price of removing them: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...


At some point they'll just embed into the video stream. TBH I had assumed they were already doing this.

EDIT: Still, point taken. I'll try to figure out how to install this on my home router—I don't ever watch youtube from my browser.


They have, and for that we have SponsorBlock https://sponsor.ajay.app/


And the irony is that if you pay for YouTube Premium, you still get these baked-in ads :/


What's ironic about it? YouTube premium removes ads that YouTube adds to videos. Those sponsor ads in the videos are put there by the content creator who made the video.


Yes sorry, perhaps not ironic, disappointing or deceptive would be more appropriate.

YouTube could enforce the content creator to tag the sponsored segments.


There's a different extension to auto skip the (community defined) ad segments in videos. There will always be a way.


And what would be the reason for this subsidy? Do they think YouTube is going to keep growing and it's worth waiting for them to become somehow more popular? Would it be catastrophic for Alphabet if other large players entered YouTube's market?

And why would losing a subsidy mean increasing prices? As far as I can tell consumers think YouTube's offerings are overpriced as is and they could probably increase profit by lowering them, especially if it's not their parent's add subsidiary they'd be cannibalising.


Because google currently gets valuable ads data from youtube. So even if the product itself runs at a loss the net benefit is positive.

If its spun off then the platform has to stand on its own and it would need to make more money.


> it would need to make more money

Really? Why?

Can it? If so why hasn't it done that already?


because they are running it more lean to maximize the data gathering potential. which is what is valuable to the parent company.


YouTube ads generated almost $9B last quarter. I think that should be a viable business on its own?


I'd pay a modest fee for a non-tracking, ad-free, non-enshittified YouTube though. Compete for my money!


Like Youtube Premium? https://www.youtube.com/premium


Does it remove tracking and returns the dislike button?


No. It also doesn't make pigs fly, or put your pants on for you like in Wallace and Gromet.


Not for me, as long as its owned by Google, I'm not paying a cent.


Crazy expensive compared to what they actually make off of ads. Who can justify this?


No. I prefer newpipe


So you wouldn't actually pay a modest fee.


When you're paying for a service, you generally expect something better than a third-party can achieve by deleting parts of your free offering.


This is moving the goal posts and completely arbitrary. There are many services that are ad supported and have a paid version without the ads.

For some reason, free and ad free YouTube seems like a birthright to so many people.


If an entity takes measures to ensure that its service becomes the de-facto default in an area, that entity gives up its entitlement to dictate the terms of use of that service. We need something like this in our systems of ethics, or we permit Freedom Monsters (ref: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/259). Note that this isn't the only solution, but I expect other solutions to have the same shape.

If Google didn't promote YouTube so heavily, permitted channels to migrate to other services (like how they permit Blogger blogs to migrate to other websites), bundled a generic streaming video player with Android (e.g. VLC) instead of the YouTube app… then maybe I'd be more sympathetic to the position of content blocker opponents. To convince me to pay for YouTube, you have to offer me something other than "we've locked a capability of your computer away, but you can get it back if you pay us!".


Notably, there's no need to move the goalposts, as they remain unmet; the original premise was

> a modest fee for a non-tracking, ad-free, non-enshittified YouTube

And YT Premium is

[x] modest fee - I could argue that either way (is $14/mo really "modest"?), but let's allow it

[ ] non-tracking - not that I'm aware of

[~] ad-free - partially; right now YT itself won't add more ads, so you're just left with the ads that uploaders embed

[~] non-enshittified - depends what you mean; ex. I believe it does restore the ability to play audio with the screen off, but not downvoting


iOS can play audio with the screen off and doesn’t require YT premium. Bit of an OS hack but it’s just a few taps:

-Start your YT video (from iOS app) -Swipe up to have the floating player while it plays. -Swipe down from top center to bring down your notifications bar. The video will automatically pause but you’ll have the large play button right there. -Hit play -while still on the notification bar screen, and while the audio starts playing again: Swipe down from the top right corner to bring up your control center. - now turn off your screen and audio should still play.

This has been working for me for a while. Don’t recall where i first came across it but it’s been a few years now.

I don’t use it often because I have streaming services with higher audio quality but it’s nice to not worry about accidentally tapping the screen while listening to YT. Esp if you wanna keep the phone in your pocket. Also saves battery juice.

Cheers.


You can also start the video in the web browser (haven’t tried the app), turn off the screen, turn it back on, hit play on lock screen, turn the screen off again. Podcasts for poor people


Hackers will spend unlimited amounts of time and energy to argue why they shouldn't pay for something. I think it was the Dalai Lama who said that the highest ethical principle that exists is to use things without paying for them, and that it is in fact the people providing goods and services who are oppressing the people who are using them. But I could have remembered wrong.


I would if YouTube were user respecting for paying users. I pay for a lot of other media fwiw


There are options for you, like Floatplane and Nebula. The problem is universal - their curated content has limited appeal. The YouTube model is more attractive to people, so more people upload content to a larger audience. I have no confidence that a paid-only platform could reach 1/100th of the traffic YouTube gets in a similar timespan.

As a customer you really just have to ask yourself what you're willing to give up when paying for a YouTube analog. Content creators aren't going to engage in a mass exodus unless they're convinced their audience will follow them to other platforms.


Nebula is more like Netflix for vlogs and explainers as it lacks comments and livestreams.


You say "lacks comments" like it's a bad thing.


Search of youtube is absolutely horrendous so I don't see any additional harm to from splitting them.

And of course the benefits are so large as to be difficult to enumerate.


What’s horrendous about it in particular?


It frequently shows me videos that have nothing to do with the query, within the top 10 results. I'm not talking about being not precise; it's something that has completely no relevance.

For example, searching for recipes sometimes shows me Political News, and sometimes the news is even in a different country, and in a language that I don't speak.

Sometimes I also get a few results that are not just irrelevant, but intentionally made to have a visually repulsive thumbnail, like a zoomed-in shot of some skin pathology, which is something that I never search for or click upon. No idea what is happening there.


How to search for actual videos instead of random shorts that people put together on a phone for some god-forsaken social media credit? Protip: you can't filter out those "shorts".

How to block some posters from ever showing up in my search results?...


There are plenty of browser extension to filter away shorts. I.e. Enhancer for YouTube: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/enhancer-for-youtub...


Requiring a browser extension rather proves my point though.


I suppose I don't have particulars to complain about. It's simply never worked unless I had a very, very specific video in mind to look for that I could tailor my query to. Instead I just see popular videos.


there is lot of creepy and gore content that is fed between keywords, in order to bait kids and make them see shocking content. Type the symbol . for example, or some Disney characters (like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate or https://www.reddit.com/r/ElsaGate/ if you like to have a starting point )

Sadly not fixed

https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/tebv1z/comment/ihb...

if you are really adventurous


That is bloody weird.


Try searching for videos using any other search engine and you'll see much better results. When I can't find a specific video I'm looking for, using another search engine always finds it.


Google SSO, for some reason it redirects through YouTube


I believe it bounces through accounts.youtube.com just to establish cookies on that domain. Everything else is under google.com, so the rest of the services are already good to go without a bounce.


They use it for 2FA also. Sometimes when I'm signing on to my google account from a new device, it asks me to open the YouTube app on my phone and authorize the sign-in.


YouTube would die.

Although it generates a large amount of revenue, YouTube's costs are substantially higher. It provides Google with engagement and a prime source of user data, so subsidising it has been an acceptable trade-off for Alphabet. Recent attempts to increase revenue, although partially successful, have shown that the platform is unlikely to pay its own way because universal accessibility is fundamental to YouTube's success; removal of the free level is not a viable option.


> It provides Google with engagement and a prime source of user data, so subsidising it has been an acceptable trade-off for Alphabet.

If this is true, why bother with ads? It's completely ruined the platform.


They can still sell those data, to Alphabet, Meta, whomever, all of them


What if the free tier was illegalised by the court order?


The most interesting implications may be social, not technological. Historically, there is nothing new about the ultrawealthy running their own publishing platforms to push their own political agendas. The internet has broadened the potential reach of those efforts to new heights though. Splitting YouTube off from Google might be enough to put it in reach of going private similar to what happened with Twitter.


First hit on google says: $31.5 billion in ad revenue in 2023.

That figure does not include 100 million subscribers (2024).

I am outside my comfort zone but I would bet youtube would thrive without google if those numbers are correct. And it is for sure large enough to not need google for bulk deals etc.


I'm not sure you're appreciating the massive scale of YouTube. Billions of videos (from music videos to a random person's 10 hour hiking video nobody cares about), stored all around the world, and ready to be delivered quickly to anyone. Oh and apps for any platform imaginable. This is not cheap.


About 3.9 billion videos (of which almost 1 billion shorts) results in more than $9 in revenue for each video ever uploaded, in 2023 alone.

You get a lot for a billion dollars.


yeah not cheap. Like 10bi/year? Still 20bi profit.


a split setup could still allow login to youtube with a google ID; just like you can login to some sites using google/facebook/etc - so that might stop that breaking.

(I did notice today that Google video search was dominated by Tiktok results rather than youtube for the first time)


Which is how YouTube worked when Google bought it. I had to live through the nightmare of consolidating separate Google accounts and YouTube accounts with the same email address. Same with Blogger. It's not hard to imagine YouTube just being another separate oAuth'd account.


The merging of YouTube and Google identities was an absolute nightmare. I was managing a site that used, I believe it was called "Google Apps for Your Domain" at the time, the predecessor to Google Workspace.

Ultimately we disabled YouTube in the Google admin panel for the organization, and advised the users to start sharing an unrelated Gmail account to manage the org's YouTube page.

I can't imagine un-merging the service logins to go any better.


Not exactly technical but...

Personally, I might start paying a subscription for YouTube. I wouldn't be forced to use a Google account for YouTube, and I would actually invest in my YouTube account.

Most importantly I would start trusting YouTube if it parts its way with Google.


How much work would it take to sever youtube from the google infrastructure? I'm imagining the entire organization working on it for multiple years to make it happen.


I think there will be two companies instead of just one.


The question is whether YouTube would still be allowed to sell Google ads. If the ad service is still Google, a breakup is pointless.


Sooner or later youtube would have its own ad network.


Youtube would no doubt improve. Google is only good at search, and even then nowadays it is really annoying.


Good things


Why are you worried about this? Have you read something related?


The US DOJ is weighing breaking up Google, among other possible remedies in the antitrust case.


They’d both be in the top10 Internet advertising juggernauts.


Both Youtube and Google might get more competitors.


YouTube would become more like TikTok.


YouTube already wants to be more like TikTok, so, I’m not really sure what your point is.


Google would lose the bleeder called YouTube that on its own would tank in 6 months




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