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this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/gross-profit
Huh, they seemingly have money to not fuck our eyes without lube for ads, but I guess they somehow just don't have enough money, 156 billion dollars is really nothing after all. Probably more money in between my couch cushions. Such a small indie company that has to struggle to remain afloat, like an Etsy store.
BIG NUMBER MUST GO UP
MUST APPEASE THE GOD OF CAPITALISM AND THE ALMIGHTY SHAREHOLDERS!
Of course they don't have enough money
The goal is (as always) to have all the money
This phenomenon is normally created by a bunch of mid level people without many stock options trying to get promotions. They need the big arrow to go up to get a good raise, be recognized, etc in their individual business units.
The people pushing things to go up are typically not motivated by the gross number as much as they are making their boss happy enough to pay them more. That's why the change is all that matters.
Yes but does YouTube it's self make money? There isn't a reason to run a section of your company if it costs you money.
I am not justifying 17 ads in a 10 minute video, but no company keeps a product that doesn't make money
It's funny that you say this, because Google intentionally ran YouTube without making any profit from it for many years. The goal (which they succeeded in) was to starve out any competition and establish YouTube as the online video monopoly. Ever since establishing that monopoly, they've been squeezing more and more money out of the platform knowing that social inertia will work against any would-be competitors (everything is on YouTube, all of the content creators are on YouTube, all of the viewers are on YouTube, so how does someone convince enough people to move to another platform?).
That's how they're able to pull this anti-adblock nonsense, in fact. If they hadn't killed off all competitors, everyone would just be going to them.
True but data collection is still done and generates $$$
Think about gmail & Google docs
That's why they want to run more ads.
Prominent example is printer hardware and the ink. Hardware is sold at little mark-up or at a loss and then they force you to use their iteration of liquid gold. Printer ink is dirt cheap to manufacture and costs more than human blood.
There are lots of reasons that one area of your company may make less money. It’s like how the NYC subway or post office technically don’t “make money” but the value they bring to the whole system is a net positive by enabling all the other companies to make way more.
Government ≠ Private/Publically shared company.
Google couldn't care less about what it brings if it doesnt make more money than it takes.
Data aquisition for analysis, AI training, tracking and simply having monopolized a space. Theres a lot of positives and indirect profit that might make it feasible.
But does it "Good" for the public like say road improvement?
It does "Good" for the company by increasing the quality of the output of it's AI/LLM, more data to track users etc.
You just confirmed what I said...
what does this mean? is it the stock market in general or google or is it tech co's?
Fairly sure that Alphabet is google parent company
It’s Google’s parent company. Like meta to fb.
How do you think they make that money? I mean yes it is an insane amount and do they need that much but they would still have ads.
Just because a company is profitable it doesn't mean they can't ask users to pay for a service.
I don't love Alphabet either, but in their shoes I'd block ad filters too. YouTube is spectacularly expensive to run.
Ok, I'm curious. Gonna do some math.
I'll admit, that number is bigger than I expected. But almost any other line item on their budget sheet would be bigger.
ETA: it's worth noting that YouTube has estimated operating costs of $5B, so this isn't coming anywhere near making them unprofitable.
Is that 10 million active users of uBlock Origin or 10 million active installs? Also relevant because I've seen workplaces that deploy UBO to all users thanks to advertising being an easy vector of getting users to click random links they shouldn't
So I can't find my original source for that one anymore, but I looked at the Chrome Web Store and addons.mozilla.org and they show a total of ≈17m (10mil on Chrome, 6.9mil on Firefox).
I don't see a good active users number on uBlockO's website or anything, and I also don't have a good way of estimating how many of those installs are second or third browsers; but an enterprise install probably wouldn't go through the extension storefronts and would instead be delivered directly via MDM. Whether that means they'd count toward the browsers' totals, I'm not sure.
Still, it seems to me that the vagaries around this probably cancel each other out decently well; sure, some might be double-counted or enterprise installs, but the actual uBlockO users are probably more inclined to be power users, online more often than other users. I'd say that 4% is probably in the ballpark at least. Maybe it's 1%, maybe it's 6%, but I don't think it's terribly far off.