As a long-time user hearing YouTube wants to play ads when I pause a video

https://lemmy.world/post/14798745

As a long-time user hearing YouTube wants to play ads when I pause a video - Lemmy.World

I’m a software engineer at AWS and work on video content delivery for services like Netflix. The idea that one single ad could cover the cost of delivering a video that’s been replicated in multiple servers, multiple forgets, multiple countries throughout the world is pretty hilarious. No matter how much money you think YouTube is making I can almost guarantee it’s not enough. There is a reason there is no significant competition in this space, it makes no money.

Genuine question.

How is been running for almost 20 years, most of them with very few ads?

I doubt they had been just sinking money for the kind of their hearts.

I do not know how much it cost to run a service like YouTube. Or how much money they make by ads or other ways. But they have been running for long enough to be a successful business.

And it’s just the latest few years when they are pushing these aggressive techniques.

How is been running for almost 20 years, most of them with very few ads?

Investor money, then Google money. Video streaming requires fuckloads of storage and is a HUGE bandwidth hog, especially if people want to watch stuff at 1080p or higher resolutions. Youtube is a money pit, but it’s a major and nearly untouchable internet power, especially given its size and reach.

And it’s just the latest few years when they are pushing these aggressive techniques.

The “easy money” from loans with very low interest rates has dried up, also Google being Google.

There’s also the cost to transcode the video and audio streams into different formats so they don’t have to do it on demand whenever someone watches a video. That’s a lot of compute cost plus they have to store all of those additional transcodes which is more storage cost.