There is clearly a significant increase in ads on youtube. It's now as bad as old cable TV channels, its disgusting, personally started reducing youtube consumption. They must've turned on the "milk youtube" knob. Hoping there will be a youtube competitor, they are pretty much a monopoly .
No fucking way. Cable TV channels had as much ads as they had content. Youtube is around 2x1min ad per 30 min video, longer ones are skippable and you get no ads if you pay for $15/m for it.
You paid cable TV $90/m for 12-15 min of ads on 30 min shows.
Not parent. The few YT channels that I know of and that produce worthwhile stuff are either unmonetized or can be supported via merch or directly, so no harm done blocking ads.
Especially now that there's ads even on videos by unmonetized channels and YTers who do and share shit because they authentically enjoy it. You know, those that made the site worthwhile in the first place in 200x.
And the mind-crushing amount of clickbait and spam by "professional content creators"? Well, that can go the way of the dodo.
A lot of creators have multiple revenue streams that one can support (merch, patreon, affiliate links). Not watching youtube ads does not have to mean you are hurting creators.
Not watching YouTube ads means they get less money. Yes, there are still alternatives for them to eek out some revenue, but they are making less than if you just watched the ad or got YT premium
This is anecdotal, but it seems like most career youtube creators are only relying on youtube ad revenue for a small portion of their total income. Video claims and unreliable monetization have long plagued youtube so it makes sense for creators to look to things like brand deals and patreon for the majority of their income. I’d much rather not watch ads and then compensate for it by supporting them through some other means.
Youtube is probably varying the rate of ads displayed for each user based on some factors. I was watching an hour long interview and was shocked that I was served a 30 second ad every 3-4 minutes. I scanned the comments for outrage, but there were no negative comments. I think YT may have increased my ad rate because I was using a VPN.
I think they will use ads as a form of tax, to discourage certain behavior, and even certain content. I think I notice this more on libertarian leaning videos (although I definitely haven't done any rigorous analysis re that).
Can't wait for the day everything is decentraly hosted, and we access it through whatever portal we want.
Been lurking on hn for a year now, finally made an account because I can give some value with a comment
Youtube content creators can choose where to put the ads themselves. You will come across many videos with only the first ad or the ads set sparely in the video, some even put the ads in breaks.
You can also chose to let YouTube put the ads but that’s also a one and done, one setting per video. I can confirm though that YouTube, on the automated setting, put way more ads in the past year or two than before.
I've had several videos now where I get an ad every few minutes, and I'm curious how consistent it could be when none of the comments acknowledge it. Are you aware of different viewers getting different numbers of ads?
Isn't there a limit on how often you can run ads? I remember some Youtuber talking about how people are deliberately making their videos just over 10 minutes long because then they can also put an ad in the middle, not just at the beginning or end, or something like that.
> I think they will use ads as a form of tax, to discourage certain behavior, and even certain content. I think I notice this more on libertarian leaning videos (although I definitely haven't done any rigorous analysis re that).
That is an extraordinary claim, and needs some extraordinary evidence to back it up.
I watched a Jordan Peterson video on Dr. Oz's official channel, and I got an ad every 3 - 4 minutes. What do you make of that evidence (given I'm not lying)? None of the comments acknowledged it.
I thought so too, but it's been so periodic and so often that I thought it couldn't be the content creator. The fact that no one complains in the comments makes me think there are other options as well, and not ones that the content creator controls.
Cable TV has 12-15 minutes of ads per hour depending on network. It's been that way for a very long time, but slightly on the rise for the last few years.
Those competitors will also need to cover their costs somehow, they'll either resort to ads or subscriptions. YT premium is just 12$/month, it's the best 12$ I spend every month, YT music is a bonus.
My trained hand hits the +10s button in a fraction of a second :)
Usually when I'm watching "mainstream" content on Youtube I just skip the first one or two minutes entirely. There's always a lot of ceremony, "don't forget to like and subscribe", fancy intros etc. It takes me a couple of seconds to find out where the content _actually_ starts -- and it almost always starts after the 1 minute mark.
> The Wadsworth Constant is an axiom which states that the first 30% of any video can be skipped because it contains no worthwhile or interesting information.
Most youtubers I watch gave up on youtube ads long ago. They make money with parteon, merchandize and in video sponsors.
The ones who still get some kind of relevant revenue from Youtube constantly bitch about demonetization, takedowns and some big entities calming their content.
YouTube doesn't support the content creators I watch, they've mostly been demonetized or had their viewership hit by random algorithmic changes. I use patron or streamlabs to support the people who make what I like, not the monopolies who control the infrastructure and try to influence the overton window of society.
Yep. Almost every creator I watch is either demonetized or got banned. I'm sick of watching podcasts or gaming videos where people are saying creepy codewords to get around the censorship algorithm.
For everyone else, it's not just objectionable political stuff (right wing bullshit) being demonetized, it's stuff advertisers don't like. Tons of good content is getting cut just because someone decided they didn't like how it made their corporation look. Anything related to computer/physical security, firearms technology, and of course, anything an AI deems to be copyrighted, regardless of what it actually is. Also, usage of profanity (because who the fuck swears these days), any mention of a controversial issue (regardless of the maturity of the discussion), and anything they deem overly referential to other content, including your own.
This 'think of the creators' argument is a low-effort appeal to emotion that deviates from the core issue. Neither youtube premium or youtube ads value my privacy.
I am happy to support content creators through patreon or whatever monetization platform they choose.
What I am not ok with is having every single click and watching period profiled and stored. I would happily not block your ads if you weren't building up user profiles.
A business model with generic vanilla ads based on the video I am watching instead of my profile would still provide millions upon millions for Google and shareholders.
Targeted ads only benefit Google by selling the illusion of advertisement metrics to marketers. Neither users or content creators stand to benefit from targeted advertisement quite the contrary.
sure. and the principled way to not support them is to not consume their content. I will never understand how people rationalize this to themselves as if they're on the moral high ground here.
This is a fragile holier-than-thou argument to claim that you can go through the modern world without looking at a youtube video someone linked.
The claim of moral ground is made even less robust when they literally have a platform that attempts to track your every single move in order to monetize on targeted advertisement.
There are other business models to achieve the same profitability without privacy invasion, and I do pay for and favour those business models.
I will repeat it again targeted ads only benefit Google by selling the illusion of advertisement metrics to marketers. Neither users or content creators stand to benefit from targeted advertisement quite the contrary.
Targeted advertisement should be as illegal as robocalls.
This is my picture: you are presented two options to pay, through ads or through plain cash. you refuse both and yet still feel entitled to the content. what do you object to in this framing?
To be clear, in the context of this discussion I don't care how you feel about paying through ads. It is their right to lock their content behind those gates.
I'm not familiar with how content creators get paid by YouTube. If it's by views or view duration, does NewPipe not increase those on YouTube when a video is viewed via NewPipe?
And there are other ways to support creators if someone were to insist on it. A lot of channels that I support have moved to Nebula, other channels have Patreons, or push their own products.
Ha, for me YouTube Music is a small but negative value contribution. I'd rather choose to never see any YouTube Music-related UI or marketing even if I am technically paying for it as part of YouTube Premium.
Google is heavily pushing YouTube premium now, so they're trying to make the experience as crappy as possible for free users.
I don't watch nearly enough YouTube to justify $12 a month, but I'm starting to consider ad blockers. Or just stop watching Youtube altogether, which wouldn't be all that hard. There are only a couple of channels I check out from time to time, and one isn't monetized so the ads are fairly reasonable. The other however had ad breaks every 5 minutes, which is just killing it for me.
I have YouTube TV - which is great by the way - but the fact it doesn't include YouTube Premium for free or the ability to add YouTube Premium for something like $5/month just sticks in my craw. So being the stubborn mule that I am I refuse to pay the $12/month for YouTube Premium and now I'm watching less and less of YouTube as a result.
At a guess, for the same reasons visual ads are - they've got some kind of targeting logic that needs to pick from a pool of ads and send them to the viewer. Though of course if YT started serving them all from indistinguishable sources, or composited them together on the fly, or ... I'd be sad.
I don't know why and I don't want to jinx it but I get no ads at all when using youtube on my laptop. Only on my mobile which is why I don't watch youtube there.
I whole heartedly refuse to use the youtube app or youtube on a vanila browser. If I use youtube it is typically because someone sent me a link. I used to open it in firefox with ublock (both on desktop and Android).
Youtube has gone one level beyond with the auto play nuissance and the new hostile EU consent forms. I am at a point that I will just refuse to engage with the platform and only play a video by copying the video id into the url:
www.youtube.com/embed/<video-id>
And then just open it in ff or mpv
They could have extracted a fortune with banner ads and the like. But it is never enough for shareholders, they wanted to scale this further and keep hogging data and profiling everyone.
Targeted advertisement should be as illegal as robocalls.
The common case is roles outside Google's core competencies, e.g. janitors and cooks.
As you would expect at a company Google's size, there are exceptions to this. Security guards aren't contractors on the MTV campus, but they are on nearly every other site. On the flip side, I've heard anecdotes that some SWEs are temps but I'm not sure of the details there.
Yes and much like tech companies outsource their entire campus staff to contractors, oil companies operate a web of companies that a handle all the hard heavy field work.
A firm like NRG only has 5000 official full time employees but have tens of thousands of oilfield workers, also protects them from legal liability.
The question is if they generating this much per employee, why employee does not get 30%? They are okay to charge app developers this much in app store, so why they think the effort of employees is not worth 30%?
If I was their employee, I'd quit.
Job market is just a market, and there is no law on how much employer should pay. Employee chose one company over another on an absolute number basis, not on the ratio.
I know you're just being satirical, but this kinds of arguments are brought up quite frequently even in serious debates. But the reality is that:
1. Ads depends on its cloud and core infrastructures to run its system.
2. Majority of its revenue directly comes from owned and operated properties, such as Search and YouTube Ads.
3. Chrome and Android have been key strategical components for being independent from other platforms. Google Ads won't be profitable as is if other OS/browser had 100% market dominance.
If you includes all of them, I think it's more of 6~70k employees rather than 10k.
Huge, sophisticated infra investment that trumps anything MS or Amazon have on offer. No, k8s doesn't compare, and neither MS nor Amazon even have the physical machines to handle existing ads and search traffic without a multi-year, 11-figure data center build out.
No, this is a fairly common criticism of public companies: stock markets don't like conglomerates, they value them at a discount [0]. It gives less power to stock holders. Investors should be able to decide whether they want to keep their position in a browser company or a mobile phone OS company instead of Google managers deciding it.
Instead of having one highly profitable company focused on ads that pays out excellent dividends, Google leadership chose to spend it on lots of expensive employees instead.
A good counter argument to this is that if Google didn't do it, then a significant portion of their valuation would vanish due to the issue that in technology, companies which can't transition to newer revenue models perish as technology evolves.
So personally I don't agree with the criticism, but I think it's legitimate.
I'm confused by the conglomeration argument... even beyond the innovator's dilemma aspect.
The conglomerate market cap may be less than the sum of its parts at any given instant, but that completely discounts the strategic interplay between subsidiaries that results in substantially larger growth prospects & marketshare capture.
This isn't universally true -- e.g. GE Healthcare & GE Aviation probably have very little overlapping strategic benefit. However, Google Adwords, Adsense, YouTube, Gmail ads, etc all benefit from common infrastructure & distribution. Or in the case of Berkshire, the ability to gobble up new investments relies on the tax-advantaged leverage of the insurance float.
It also doesn't values the leverage owning complete ecosystem gives the company. If Apple decides to split iPhone, iOS, iPad, AppStore, Music/Content in different companies the value will be much lower than of a company together. Total>Σ(parts)
Please don't cross into personal attack. Regardless of what you feel you owe another commenter, you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
Would you please stop using HN for this hobbyhorse? We've been through this for years now, and I feel like I've been noticing your username crossing the line again in recent threads.
Thoughtful critique is welcome but when something becomes mechanically predictable, that's not the same thing, and when it's mechanically predictable flamewar that's particularly bad.
I was mostly pointing out that the parent's comment woefully ignored over half of Google's workforce in their calculation. The fact that that over half doesn't get stable employment, health care, or any other benefits associated with Google is also particularly relevant to their profitability on a per head basis.
I will try to keep it down, there's a lot of Googlers in today's thread, and it's obvious I upset a few.
> there's a lot of Googlers in today's thread, and it's obvious I upset a few.
Potshots like that make things worse, and make me fear that you don't want to use HN as intended. If you keep that up we're going to end up having to rate-limit your account again.
It's not clear how you'd know how many Googlers there are in threads, and in any case taking swipes at people is against the site guidelines. Please stick to your substantive points.
There's also something about conducting a campaign against any $thing (including any $BigCo), finding fault with literally every aspect of everything they do, which is in the spirit of battle rather than curiosity, and so is against the intended use of this site. Please don't use HN for such agendas. It's tedious, and it evokes worse from others.
I don't know about all the types of contractors they hire but they've sure been great to the ones that work in their cafes by paying them for the past year despite the campuses being closed.
If these so called underpaid contractors skilled enough they can definitely look for another job or try to get hired directly in Google or other companies.
- Nobody has forced them to slave at contracting positions.
- Contracting positions definitely pays better than flipping burgers
- It's about supply and demand - If they have skills in demand they will get paid well.
I am sure you also outsource some aspect of your life as it's either not your core skills or expertise, similarly nothing wrong if these big tech outsource non core business aspect to contractors.
In capitalist society it's government's job to set rules so that underclass employees are not exploited. Not corporations.
I'm a Google shareholder partly because I find their ads are so poorly targeted at me.
For example, I'm currently looking to buy a car - my recent search history includes "buy z4" and "merc c class". Yet YouTube is showing me generic ads for the local supermarket and off-track-betting (and I've never gambled in my life). So it seems Google has a lot of room to improve the algorithm that matches viewer to advertiser
> people need to work on their algorithms for sure.
Do they?
Most adspace buyers are utterly clueless about how Google algorithms work.
The flaws the OP describe are real, but my bet is 80 to 90% of adspace buyers have no idea of the shortcomings.
Nor do they care BTW: the ROI on their ad dollar when spent on GOOG is so much higher than traditional channels ever were that they just set the drip in place and never look back.
You also need to take into account user annoyance, would you rather show a 10$ ad today, but lose the user and never show another ad or show a 2$ ad every month until eoy. There's a lot more than just revenue that factors into these algorithms. And you also need to take into account advertiser's ROI, they want people who will convert.
Source: used to work on prediction modelling in ads.
If they showed the perfect ad, advertisers would be willing to spend much per view. As an advertiser I might pay some low CPM to blast my ad with poor targeting, but if instead they only showed my ad to exactly the correct people who will click and buy it, I would pay up to my marginal revenue per sale
I have a similar approach to Amazon's stock, as long as my package isn't delivered within an hour, there's still lots of growth left (ignoring aws and all).
> I'm a Google shareholder partly because their ads are so poorly targeted at me.
What?
Also, I'm fine with ads not being targeted at me. It's really annoying to look up information on a toaster and then get bombarded with ads for toasters.
I find it more annoying when you get bombarded after buying the toaster. Surely they know I made that purchase and don't have a need for multiple toasters.
(disclaimer-I work at Google but have no hidden insights here)
If you randomly show ads, what are the odds someone just happens to be in the market for a new one toaster? 1 in 1000?
On the other hand, what are the odds that someone who just bought a new toaster ends up returning it and being in the market for a new one? Probably much higher.
This! All these comments about how bad ads are at targeting a proper audience really miss the point, you have to make comparisons to conclude anything. If an ad is relevant for x% of users and x is very small, that's still better than 0.5*x%.
I don't think it's a mistake if after you bought product P, you get ads for P, it probably does work in practice.
Information you don't have is by definition not relevant to compare targeting strategies, which are based on information they do have.
Either you have this information, then Rebelgecko's comment explains why it would make sense to still have such ads.
Or you don't have this information, then other information (such as "you searched for P") probably leads to this result as well.
In both cases this strategy makes sense intuitively, and I'm pretty sure that ad-tech knows what it's doing to maximize returns, if only by looking at the metrics.
A billion of the profit increase is from expected depreciation adjustment, but growing profit by 2.5x in one year if bonkers. Search made $7 billion more this year and as far as I can tell is effectively exactly the same as it was last year. Goes to show how much advertising money has shifted away from traditional forms like tv/radio/print during the pandemic.
It's becoming more and more obvious just how devastating the pandemic was to "traditional" industries already on the decline, while big tech corps largely reaped all the advantages.
It's a shame that these advantages didn't trickle down to employees. I cannot see any increase in tech wages. Maybe employees should demand 30% of what is revenue per employee figure. If companies like Google find okay to charge developers 30%, then employees maybe should unionise and get paid what they deserve.
Your use of deserve makes no sense. No one deserves anything beyond what they're offered in the free market. If they think they can do better they're free to do so.
First, Google employees are amongst the best paid in the entire world. There is a point where giving people a raise becomes counter-productive.
Second, this whole "what they deserve" idea is just plain weird to me:
- salaries have strictly nothing to do with "what you deserve": they are a function of supply and demand in the labor market.
- one of the (many) reason Google is making so much money is because they can (because of the business they're in) and *have* automated a huge fraction of their day-to-day operations. So ... if the work is done by robots, what is this "deserve" thing you speak of?
> First, Google employees are amongst the best paid in the entire world.
How is that relevant? Just because they get relatively big salaries, it doesn't mean what they get is just.
> one of the (many) reason Google is making so much money is because they can (because of the business they're in) and have automated a huge fraction of their day-to-day operations. So ... if the work is done by robots, what is this "deserve" thing you speak of?
There is a lot to unpack here, but I'll just say that this is not relevant, as revenue per employee figure clearly indicates that people are heavily underpaid.
These big companies are well beside the market economy. The special rules should apply.
I think that these companies don't pay as much as they should because there is no pressure and that should change.
Many developers are unaware how they get fleeced and they think their well above average salaries is what everyone else is getting in that space and it is not correlated with the value they produce at all.
This is something a regulator should look into. Above certain threshold their pay should be tied to the revenue per employee figure at 15-30% mark.
There are usually strings attached when it comes to stocks. It's not like you open an account at one of stock trading shops and you get a voucher to buy X amount of stocks.
I know few people who left companies who paid this way, and they never could exercise their stocks. For me this is as close to a scam as it gets.
i worked there and other companies. They give you stock units every month and you can sell them when you get them. (except for short amount of time around earnings report) Its not a scam. its as good as cash if you sell them right when you get them.
youre talking about startups not google which give options not RSUs
First, the revenue isn't bad for a 10 year old business.
Eg. Google took 9 years and Facebook took 11 years to get to a $4B quarter, but of course apples and oranges on business models. Advertising has a massive margin, so Google and Facebook were very profitable at those points. AWS took about 11 years to get to a $4B Q. (You get to do the adjustment for inflation ;-)
The problem is that unless you are monitizing a private cloud (Google-classic, Facebook, Apple, etc), the Cloud revenue sweet spot is enterprise sales, and enterprise sales are hard, with long cycles and expensive sales support requirements. When you are playing catch-up there are many more ways to lose a deal than close one.
Year-over-year, Google Cloud made about $1.25B more, and lost $800M less. It sure looks like they will be in the black by the end of this year. It would be a long business cycle for a VC, but looks like a well managed business expansion.
When will the entire venture go ROI positive? Dunno, but in some ways that is a sunk cash fallacy. It looks like a pretty decent business now.
(Ex-Googler still holding GOOG in case either of those color your view of the above.)
AWS is the only cloud hosting company making any real money today. Azure technically does, but only through very creative accounting (revenues are grouped with other segments like Office 365). Anyone who is not AWS has to spend an inordinate amount of money in credits and other customer acquisition costs simply to stay competitive in the space.
Google basically hands out 100k in credits to any startup. It’s spending insane amounts of money to gain market share. But since all three clouds are doing it, the net effect is really just that software companies are getting subsidized.
AWS does this too, also to the tune of 100k iirc. You just need to show that you are funded by a known VC, and then each subsequent funding round gets you additional credits.
Correct. AWS gives you 100k credits for 1 year (or some other deal like 25k/year for 2 years). They also have tons of other incentives
* Free support and consulting (probably useful for some less technical companies)
* Free or discounted resources for POCs (ie: "This customer wants to do a 3 month POC, we're going to spend literally 0 dollars on that infrastructure")
worth noting that google doesn't give out 100k for free, or to "any startup". They give it in exchange for equity, and only through their VC partners and accelerators.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted - it's a reasonable question to ask for a (supposedly) serious competitor to AWS & Azure.
E.g. if I'm leading engineering for a startup and thinking about which of the three to invest in, the long-term profitability and stability of my choice here is important. You can't just rely on the "Google" name - if anything, that signals that they're willing to just shut it down or raise prices if they can't reach profitability targets soon.
Azure raises prices all the time esp their licensing fees. I'm sure so does azure.... So even the bigger providers increase prices to meet targets . Are you expecting static prices
Revenue is up 46% to $4B for Q1 2021. But the costs to close the biggest deals must be gargantuan. Anthos dev & sales alone probably requires a substantial bet ;)
They want market share more than anything. The intention is to trade short-term profits for long-term customers. This is a reasonable business strategy, especially for a business with a relatively undiversified source of profits.
Of course the short-term profits being lost don't seem so short-term at this point, so Google is surely debating internally on how long they want to continue this strategy if it doesn't begin to pay off.
> so Google is surely debating internally on how long they want to continue this strategy if it doesn't begin to pay off
I am certain that nobody is considering shuttering a business unit that has an annualized revenue of $16 billion and is growing 46% per year. Anyone who is “surely debating” this would be fired from management at any sensible company.
It is worth noting that Google has shuttered dozens of products will multiple millions of users that nearly any other sensible company would not shutter, and which, outside of Google, would be considered wild successes. (So few are spun off as separate companies because Google's internal architecture is basically incompatible with anyone else operating their products.)
Google isn't interested in being a minority player in any market, if they can't capture it, they will eventually leave it.
Users != Customers as you well know. If a startup outside of Google had millions of users, they wouldn't be considered a wild success unless they could monetize those users, otherwise it's just an enormous cost that eventually leads to failures once they run out of VC runway.
And let's be real, a huge swath of VC funded startups recklessly engage in "growth hacking" to acquire users, without a legitimate business plan, usually, e.g.
And then it turns out their ideas for monetization don't work, and they get an exit via acquisition by one of the big players as the VCs try to get some of their money back and leave someone else holding the bag.
SV is littered with companies that had millions of users but ended up folding and selling, because ultimately, running a business isn't free, and those users have to generate enough revenue to cover costs plus ROI.
Sure, but most of these otherwise successful products never even attempted a business model. I could pick a dozen Google apps today and challenge you to determine how Google ever expected to benefit from them. Ironically, most random Google apps don't even display ads. I assume some might exist solely to collect ad data, but I am not sure if Google's ad team is investing steadily in how to mine worthwhile data out of each and every scattered new Google app.
Which is to say, there's probably a decent number of apps Google created and shut down, which probably would've been pretty successful companies on their own with a modest monetization model. But Google never attempted it, because the user count didn't hit nine figures.
The toothpaste is out of the tube on this one. Outside of the current path, I think the only option is spinning off GCP into a separate company. I don't think this is a bad idea either.
Because it is designed to lose money. The ROI window for digital transformation for cloud computing is pretty big. If you want to be top 3 in the industry (AWS, Azure, GCP) you've gotta spend, spend, spend. There are infinite things and features you can supply to customers. Have you seen those cloud consoles?
Not sure I understand this response, nor do I agree. AWS drove $13.5B in _profit_ for Amazon in 2020, and has been profitable since at least 2014, _8 years_ after its founding.[1]
Why isn't reasonable to ask "where and when is the profit coming?"
Not only did GCP (and Azure, etc.) have to catch up with where AWS was 8 years ago, they've got to invest even more to catch up with where AWS is now.
It's obvious that GCP is a very long-term investment, but also one that it not just purely profit-driven for GCP in isolation, but also hugely strategic for Google as a whole.
> Not sure I understand this response, nor do I agree. AWS drove $13.5B in _profit_ for Amazon in 2020, and has been profitable since at least 2014, _8 years_ after its founding.[1]
Here's the question to ask: if Google stopped investing aggressively in marketing and building new offerings to expand the Cloud userbase could it be profitable today?
Or in other words, is it better to have 30% YoY growth and on paper profitability, or 45% YoY growth and an on paper loss, with the ability to flip the switch and move to the first option whenever you want?
If they stopped spending on product and infrastructure build out, they could maybe be profitable at an instantaneous point in time. The issue is that Azure and AWS will continue developing and that will drive the market. Google share will erode and they will not be profitable again.
Is that really the case here? Is Google's marketing holding them back from profitability? Is GCP spending more on marketing than building useful products & expanding their infrastructure?
> 30% YoY growth and on paper profitability, or 45% YoY growth and an on paper loss, with the ability to flip the switch and move to the first option whenever you want?
This sounds suspiciously like a line from the WeWork documentary on Hulu.
Well its a common refrain when discussing startups and high growth business. I'm basically quoting the (ultimately correct) argument about AWS and Amazon as a whole from a decade ago. People were concerned about Amazon not being profitable (or being just barely profitable) for a long time. And then eventually they decided to be profitable.
Exactly. The difference between WeWork and Google Cloud is that WeWork has an unproven viable market, whereas cloud computing has competing, larger players. (If you are implying that GCP could collapse like WeWork)
Its pretty obvious, serving the customer is not in googles DNA, it never has and never will be. This is core to why all their consumer products have fallen flat on their face. Think google glasses, google delivery, etc
Given that I expect to never see waymo brand cars shuttling people around, most likely they will license out the tech to companies who deal with customers or to the car companies themselves.
> Given that I expect to never see waymo brand cars shuttling people around, most likely they will license out the tech to companies who deal with customers or to the car companies themselves.
I'm a big supporter of what Waymo is doing, but I've always thought this is real end game for them precisely because of the reasons you mentioned. Google is incredibly shy of anything that involves physical support and running a robotaxi service requires a lot of it along with operations/logistics. They are no Amazon.
Yes! If you factor in businesses running ads, and even Google search usage for work-related tasks, you could argue that Google is skewed B2B. In the long run, I think MS and Google have the same goal: serve businesses a buffet of services they need to operate: productivity, cloud, ads.
I own Google stocks for the nebulous reason of "AI" for the long term (If the AI overlords invent AGI, I don't want to miss out). With capital gains taxes, I'm not going to trade in and out of every stock every quarter, although it's good to see it go up after hours.
I'm mostly interested in how Waymo is doing, as it has the option to clean up air quality by using electric cars, but sadly it's still a very secretive part of Alphabet.
Kinda hate to see those share buybacks. You'd think with an organization that large they could think of something useful to do with fifty billion dollars.
Share buybacks are equivalent to dividends. They are done when the company can’t think of how to hit their target ROI on that margin. Much better to pay back investors than invent “something useful” to spend money on a la government budget game theory.
Google is already pursuing some extremely expensive bets - GCP (see people upthread complaining about this), Waymo. At some point, it’s hard to spend any more money productively and the best thing to do is return it to shareholders to do as they please.
Google could blow all the money buying Coinbase or something, but shareholders would probably prefer Google give them the cash to made that decision individually.
That private parties hold funds of this magnitude but can't imagine what to do with it, while the country languishes without railroads and housing, indicates to me that taxation might be a little low.
it's merely a symptom of not having enough opportunities to invest in. Their workforce (and many large software companies) is already too large for the amount of opportunity available. Even, world famous software engineers like Stevie yeggie had to eventually quit due to lack of impactful things to work on.
In the absence of any opportunity, all you can do is share buybacks or dividends, or maybe give out even more employee compensation.
What's weirder is that a large chunk of expenses for these companies is stock-based compensation for employees, and then they cancel it out by doing buybacks. Maybe try just handing out cash?
I think the idea is to align the financial incentives of the employee with the financial incentives of the company. Some companies (usually pre-revenue ones) might also do it to reduce cash expenses, but that seems unlikely to be Google's motivation in this case for the reason you pointed out.
a) jurisdiction dependent, it's a bigger company than the US.
b) if they issue RSU's at $Y, then buyback stock to drive the price up to $Z, the employee's take $Y as ordinary income, and $Z-$Y as cap gains, which is usually taxed more favourably
Mostly because they are used by party donors and other wealthy people who "influence" politicians. When everyone gets paid in dividends, they'll find different mechanism for the wealthy to extract money and tax dividends just like any other income.
YouTube has become difficult to watch because of the ads. It's almost as if they're killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.
I've reluctantly switched to NewPipe, and can watch videos ad free. I'm all for supporting a business that provides a free service, but now it feels like they're just abusing their position, which is why I switched.
That's authorized, not done this quarter. Just saying that they may or may not buyback $50 billion more than was previously authorized. If they find an investment they think would provide better returns they'll push the buyback. Most companies only authorize every few years.
Their revenue goes up as their search degrades in quality.
Looks like a ripe opportunity for someone to take on the long tail search market. Duckduckgo seems poised to do this. Or perhaps some kids in a garage?
Assistant has gotten mind-blowingly good, I recently started using it after having given up on Siri and the amount of lead Google has on complex spoken queries is insane.
Otherwise, DDG is basically privacy chrome on top of Bing's results.
Are you 100% confident that this is the case? I personally have a completely different experience (their search results have gotten much better than they used to).
Personally I've felt that useful results have been pretty consistently on the first page for a while, and some of the specialized widgets have even improved that, but over the last ~3 years more and more of that has become an exercise of dodging the ads to find the actual result. Feels like the frog getting boiled.
For me it depends on what I'm searching. For more obscure stuff, I find google better. Sometimes I accidentally use bing (it's a default on one of my machines) and I usually eventually have a "oh right, this isn't Google" moment when I can't find what I'm looking for.
OTOH, if it's anything that has been SEO'd, I find google has gotten really bad. Last week I tried to google for what frying pan to buy, and everything I saw was a un-trustworthy ad.
Incidentally, it's the same for python: you google some very common thing like how to sort a list, the first few links are spam (but the docs are still high in the list usually). You google something obscure and usually get the relevant stack overflow first.
Im kind of amazed at the lack of search engine innovation. Why can't we explicitly rate results and have them be personalized to us(goodbye quora and wikihow)? Why can't we add tags to results, such as "ad bloated" and have that be taken into account for rankings?
It seems like such an obvious next step, but google is too rich for its own good at this point and doesnt need to do anything.
For the last three decades, search engines have been presenting results in descending order. While a lot of innovations have happened with the sorting algorithm, it hasn't fundamentally move forward from that.
From a user point of view, it's frustrating to look through the result, finding a list of ads, a commercial site, a few videos, a definition, a wikipedia link, a commercial site, and so on.
Instead, users have a pretty good idea of what kind of result they want. It would make it so much easier if the results are grouped together.
For example, a search engine could group results under individual tabs, separating results from user generated content sites, forums, commerce and commercial blogs, Wikipedia, content farms, and so on. Within each tab, there could be subtabs grouping results under each domain.
This would make searching the web a much less frustrating experience.
And don't we know it! YouTube has quickly become unwatchable. Some of my favorite channels are now available on Nebula. I encourage more creators to go there. I think it's $30/yr, I got a promo and got it for $11.
for what it's worth, maybe it's compensating _too_ many people, you can also pay $10/month and have ad free YouTube (_and_ YouTube Music, but if you're worried about compensating too many people avoid it, its model is just like Apple Music and Spotify)
