Alphabet gross profit for the quarter ending June 30, 2023 was $42.688B, a 7.85% increase year-over-year.
Alphabet gross profit for the twelve months ending June 30, 2023 was $160.503B, a 1.7% increase year-over-year.
Alphabet annual gross profit for 2022 was $156.633B, a 6.77% increase from 2021.
Alphabet annual gross profit for 2021 was $146.698B, a 50.01% increase from 2020.
Alphabet annual gross profit for 2020 was $97.795B, a 8.71% increase from 2019.
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.
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.
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 isn’t a reason to run a section of your company if it costs you 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?).
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.
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.
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.
It seems so strange to me that everyone buys the bullshit that personal data is worth very little.
The data brokerage industry is a multi-trillion dollar industry. Yet, there are only ~8 billion people in the world, many of whom don’t have internet access or have very little data being traded. Thus it’s reasonably safe to assume that an average regular internet user’s data is worth somewhere in the region of $1,000 per year.
These companies don’t do anything with the data. We create the data, they collect it and sell it, then whoever buys it is the one that actually makes something from it. If we allow the brokers a very generous profit margin, they are still stealing $500-700 from every one of us, every year.
I’ve finally run some actual numbers, after finding a source for the data brokerage industry value (much lower, $319 billion in 2021). The link to your instance’s version is here: lemmy.world/post/10892972
TL;DR my conservative estimate is that every user is owed roughly $40 per year - but this doesn’t include Google or other businesses who keep and exploit proprietary datasets, rather than selling the raw data.
If you’re online. You need to assume that your data is being used without your permission whether you like it or not. Nothing is going to change. Look at the hordes of brain dead idiots who use tiktok
That’s the wrong attitude to have. It can change, and arguably it will change once a critical mass of people realise the value being stolen from them.
You can’t build a car without paying for the nuts and bolts. The people who make nuts and bolts don’t know how to build a car, but they’re still paid a fair value based on the fact their product can be used in cars.
We don’t know how to do anything with our data, but we should be paid based on the value derived from it by those that do.
This problem affects everyone, including the people who make laws. It is entirely feasible that we can get enough people on side to change things and make it more fair. Incumbent businesses won’t like that, because it will reduce their profits (100% down to 30%), but what they’re doing now is absolutely wrong. They’d still be taking the piss at 30%, but at least that’s more in line with other industries.
The efficacy of advertising is sold primarily by advertisers. It’s possibly worth a vanishing fraction of what these ghouls say it’s worth. But so long as buying it and acting like a greedy invasive bastard is more profitable than ignoring it, even by a tiny margin, corporate giants will keep doing it, since the cost to them is a rounding error.
The industry enabling this is large because they get to sell the same garbage to so many bastards.
I’d like to add to the sentiment of this post by saying that if you ever used any of those amazing websites, I’m sure the developers will highly appreciate it if those with the means could consider contributing to their projects.
We all know how greedy and shameless YouTube can be, and yet those developers give us incredible products for free. And if you ever saw the entitled requests of some users on their projects’ pages whenever YouTube implements some changes, and they have to rush to fix their code, I’m sure you would appreciate them even more. I’ve personally seen quite a few projects being abandoned because of the sometimes thankless job of being a developer, and I would hate it for any of these to suffer a similar fate.
So if you can and are willing, feel free to join me in contributing to:
The irony of these smalltime maintainers asking for donations when their own software is purpose made to hurt the income of smalltime creators. Particularly if they include Sponsorblock.
Out of curiosity I went to the project’s page and saw more info on why they don’t take donations:
Free. Open-source. For users by users. No donations sought. If you ever want to contribute something, think about the people working hard to maintain the filter lists you are using, which are available to use by all for free.
Its crazy all my piped servers stopped working which sucks, if anyone is willing to share a server that works or a self hosted one they could let me in. Hit me up
Do you walk into the dealer and state affirmatively “I am not buying a car here because I don’t want a subscription!” and then turn around and walk out?
Won’t matter. The company knows you don’t want this. They also know that enough other people will pay for it that it won’t matter. These subscriptions are not new. If people put their foot down and refused to pay for them they would go away, but the opposite it happening.
They can see the percentage of people who watched that part of the video, as part of the video analytics. This doesn’t track the user, though, at least not if you have history turned off, or are using another front end.
Well when a video is buffered it’s loaded in memory but not viewed yet, they can’t count loading the video as a view or they’d count the whole video as viewed if you simply buffered it in full, it would also screw up that watched timestamps feature to see which part has been played back most.
So yes they can count how many times it has been streamed but they also need to know you’ve watched it because sitting on pause while the video buffers all the way through isn’t a view, it isn’t watching those segments, but it does stream them from the servers, in the same way Newpipe and Grayjay does. Which is how a video can register no views despite being watched on something like NewPipe.
As I’ve mentioned in another thread, I believe YouTube provides analytics on this (hence the “most replayed” parts for some videos), and I’m certain I’ve seen some creators mention sposors requiring that information before a deal is made. So it may really hurt some small youtubers that can’t rely on merchandise sales.
That said, I personally use sponsorblock as I don’t feel like wasting my life on nordvpn ads, but I have to admit sponsor segments are a whole lot better than regular YouTube ads.
Edit: And as I far as I know they pay much better than regular ads.
I wish there was an add-on that could fake a view for the sponsored segment for the creator but skip it for the user. I.e. every time the user skips a sponsored segment, the extension adds a view for the sponsored segment for the creator, so they get paid whilst we skip their segment.
It’s true that YouTube does track the most watched portions of a video, but in the case of clients like NewPipe or this one the way the video is parsed it doesn’t send the analytic data necessary, so it likely doesn’t even count views, let alone watched segments.
Well, it does harm creators, as they may get less money. The same goes for adblockers.
Then again I don’t really understand why would you care about being “shamed”, especially by a company that charges money for a frontend using YouTube’s (extremely expensive) servers for free.
Then again I don’t really understand why would you care about being “shamed”, especially by a company that charges money for a frontend using YouTube’s (extremely expensive) servers for free.
To paraphrase Norm MacDonald: the worst part is the hypocrisy 😅
“extremely expensive” is a bit of an overstatement.
Youtube proper, not the rest of Google, is tens of billions in the black, annually.
They reached this level of control over the market by running without video ads for a long time, forcing competitors to close out or not even open into the market without similar money backing. Turning around now and forcing tracking and ads should open them up to antitrust suits.
It’s all arbitrage. If you can afford YouTube Premium’s price, and don’t mind the tracking, go for it. But all this ad blocking and alternative front ends MIGHT come to half a billion annually. uBlock has around 15 million installs, each installed user- assuming all separate and unique and blocking YouTube- would have to deny YouTube $1000 annually for it to be affecting their revenue.
I mean, the person making the video you are watching respected your time to the point they put in 10-100x the amount of time it takes you to watch that video to make it.
And the sponsor ad is how they afford said time commitment.
Shit, I didn’t realize there were 48 hours in a day.
Sorry, you’re right. Creators should work their 9-5 and then spend another 8 hours a day making videos for us out of the goodness of their hearts. I now think it’s disgusting that these people try to monetize their hard work
I think it’s ironic that the argument is both “sponsor segments don’t respect my time!” AND “I have no respect for the time of the creators”
Nobody needs YouTube videos nor is anyone compelled to make them. I’m guessing you don’t remember when YouTube was completely free and people just made videos for fun?
Now people quit jobs that support them to do something fun and try to make monry off that. Which is fine, but we’re not required to support their hobby. Stop acting like people have no other option in their life except to make reaction videos, video essays, meme compilations, etc.
If nobody needs them then why are they complaining? Just don’t watch it. Your problem is solved!
Videos on YouTube are so much better than the era you’re remembering. If nordvpn or whoever sponsoring videos is the way for creators to continue making great things on a regular schedule, I’m not gonna make a huff when they take a minute to acknowledge them. I skip most of them, too, but I’m not venting about what a terrible inconvenience it is.
And sorry for not specifying that I wasn’t speaking about reaction videos and meme compilations when I said “high quality”, I thought it that would be pretty damn clear but I guess we watch different things on YouTube
Stop acting like it’s morally wrong to get paid for your work. If there’s a market for it, why shouldn’t people do it full time? Should Hollywood work for free, too?
Seriously, this. Advetising based economy is hell. what’s next? a punch in the face every 5 minutes of watching? And don’t you dare cover your face, because the creators deserve compensation and punch-a-face insertion by big corporation is the only way they got!
Everytime the same argument. I don’t want to see ads never ever, period. They are useless and annoying at best, sometimes plain evil manipulation.
I recognize the need of income for creators, and they can ask for money in the form of donation/subscription and other methods. I am paying and will pay for everything I want to support. If you decide that your way to sustain yourself is by shoving up fake opinions and useless noise in order to manipulate me into buying something, I don’t accept it. It’s as simple as that.
If the creators you like choose to monetize with sponsors, you can choose not to watch them instead of complaining about it on a forum. Or go create the content you like yourself.
I don’t like ads either and have stopped watching several channels because of how they use them.
“Every time the same argument” is right - “my time is valuable but the creator’s time is not!”
Go for it! I’m not holding that against anyone. I’m railing against the entitlement of saying it’s “not respectful of the viewer’s time” to have sponsored segments.
Like I said elsewhere, I think that stance is ironic because it’s not respecting the creator’s time and effort. “I want you to spend hours and hours making videos for me but I don’t want you to make money from it”
Yeah, I see video monetization as running on a similar model to that of free to play games. The majority of people either don’t make you any money or only very little money, but they boost your engagement and popularity metrics so that you get more ‘whales’ that do things like donating on Patreon, choosing to watch sponsors and use affiliate codes, and buying merch.
Ads are only the worth the actual amount of business they generate. I know that a lot of people don’t realize that even if they never intentionally buy something from an ad, the familiarity of seeing things in an ad makes them more likely to pick it over something else down the line. However, this still only works if you have any disposable income and don’t immediately hit mute, close your eyes, and count to 30 when an ad comes on. A lot of people using ad blockers would just devalue the ads themselves if they were forced to watch them. The people with the money just pay for Premium.
On one hand true, on the other, a lot of those sponsorships advertise dubious things at best. I love the channels that just shill their own merch, but being entirely fair, you need to be at a certain revenue threshold to afford making said merch.
The problem with those, 3rd party sponsorships is that they’re usually just either mobile games, F2P(P2W) MMOs, overpriced basic products or software advertised in the FUD way. Sorry, I don’t care for Raid Shadow Legends, War Thunder, Manscaped or NordVPN. Especially the last one and the ones like it grind my gears because the sponsorships for that kind of product are borderline misinformation.
All of them, in some way, can be considered somewhat predatory. I’d rather buy a silly hat or a plushie, thank you very much.
You see YouTube is a American company and in America every thing is extreme you ether have a lot of ads or no ads you can have a extremely massive car or a cat that’s soo small it doesn’t exist
Straight up what made me switch to YouTube premium was a bit of a 2 pronged thing really
They started including Google Play Music with it, and then I got an unskippable 1 hour ad in front of a video that after I reloaded the page I got the same ad again.
Edit: I don’t have an issue paying for a service if the price is right. I got what I wanted for I price I’m willing to pay.
They bundle YT Music in your subscription because they wanted a share in music streaming, invested in an infrastructure on their platform and then realized that their service doesn’t offer enough to make people want to use it over their competitors’ music streaming services. Instead of taking that loss or making their service worth using, they bundle the shit nobody wants with what everyone needs and use that to justify a price hike.
If there was a basic subscription that just removes ads on the videos I click on without any other useless crap attached to it, I would pay for that. But no, it’s predatory, anti-consumer bullshit, so I just block their ads.
The whole reason is to either make it so annoying that you switch to their paid service or get as many ad dollars into the shortest amount of time possible either way. This is just greed to squeeze as much out of the consumer before they break us.
It really is. Everyone splintering off to their own app is what got me back to it. Had Netflix, Hulu, max, Disney, prime and I think Apple plus or peacock for a while and I could never remember what service the shows I was watching were on. Opening up 4 streaming apps to find what I was watching the other day got tiresome. When it was mainly Netflix and Hulu I only pirated the few shows that were on like HBO that I wanted to see. Arr apps with plex is so nice in comparison.
I could never remember what service the shows I was watching were on. Opening up 4 streaming apps to find what I was watching the other day got tiresome.
I know what community this is, but using something like a Chromecast w/ Google TV lets you search across all your streaming services simultaneously.
In my experience, the only problem I’ve run into is the remote’s microphone feature is a bit flakey, but generally when it does work it’s right most of the time.
There are steps to piracy which cost time and effort. For most of the media I consume that time and effort cost is significantly less than the time, effort, and capital I would need to invest in a paid service. However, the time, effort, and capital I spend to play videogames has been less than piracy would cost for me for decades. Being able to effortlessly get those games running on a mobile steamdeck is orders of magnitude cheaper than what it would have cost me to set everything up myself even if I’m not paying for software and my costly version wouldn’t be nearly as smooth. This quote would be true enough even if a counter-example didn’t exist, but Steam and GOG are pretty clear demonstrations of the kind of service the average person is satisfied with even if they still have some real issues.
Am I the only one who has a distrust of pirating video games? Watching a movie is one thing but a video game is actual code running on your computer downloaded from an untrusted source.
the main problems of those blocking orders, worldwide, not only in india, is that while blocks are immediate and done with no supervision directly in the hands of the copyright trolls, unblocks are slow and need 100+ approvals
You can get someone banned on reddit easily if they say certain phrases. I banned a lot of conservative shitheels before they banned me, so I made another account.
Reddit’s admins are super touchy on violence. If someone says a thing on Reddit that sounds like they want to do violence to a person, even if it’s not a real person or they’re obviously joking, just report threatening violence for a free ban.
I'm at odds about the whole violence thing. People should be allowed to express how they feel, even if it means that they express the most grotesque way in how they'd like to handle someone they don't like. One cannot always assume someone will have the means and resources necessary to carry out the perfect murder on someone.
If we are to glorify the concept of anonymity, why are we so afraid of these kinds of expressions? You won't know who I am, you won't know where I am and you won't know much about me unless I give out details or hints to either of those things. I've long stopped making death threats to people online years ago because it sounded absolutely ridiculous, knowing that I'll never be able to reach the person whom I hate. Much less, even go through with the threat at all.
That doesn't mean I shouldn't be allowed to express how nice it'd be if I held someone's head down while riding an escalator as the feed of the steps gradually grates the skin off their face.
I think this is really just a symptom of how social media of all walks on the internet don't really do enough in the way of security and privacy so that these things are simply just that - expressions.
Uh, that's what the report button is for. Let me tell you something, you sound like the kind of person who go around calling people "soft" or "snowflake". You believe there should not be any cyber bullying laws. You believe everyone should just shut up and take it. But I bet you, you're the biggest snowflake of them all because as soon as someone dishes out what you give to others online, you'll be squealing to the moderators before you know it.
Don't lie to yourself, I see trashy people like you pull this kind of act all of the time. You're nothing special.
If only there existed a button to make that person completly disapear from you life entirly. Maybe we can call this button a block button. Hmm in reality i realy like that because it means that other people get to decide if they see an opinion i dont like. Best if we give me ultimate control to make anyone online i disagree with disapear that way ill never have to be offended ever again.
It’s not just Netflix, it’s every licensing issue in every country.
I love lots of foreign television, but quite a lot of it isn’t immediately available (or ever available) in my country.
If I want to watch those shows or movies, I am literally at the mercy of the piracy community helping me access them, because there’s a good chance that it’s either months or years away from release in my country, or that I’ll be unlucky and it will never release here at all.
It’s a completely broken system, and Gabe Newell called it what it was over a decade ago. Piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem.
It won’t be solved without massive changes to international copyrights and how shows/movies are bought and sold on an international market.
Years ago there was no way to watch one piece in my country. The only option for anime was funimation (which didn’t have a great library) and crunchy roll which had more of the big shows but it would be incomplete. Like a show would only have the second season or last season. Anyway the only way to watch one piece was via an extension to Firefox that spoofed crunchy roll but still required a premium subscription.
The only other way to watch one piece was online with sites like anime paha.
Also it gets real expensive paying for 4-5 services when theres a show on Amazon you want to watch, maybe 2-3 on apple, 1 on Netflix and 4 on Disney + and that’s not even including star trek.
But yeah, people will pay for convenience. Nobody wants to dig around for pirated links if a simpler option is available.
But yeah, I hear you on international licensing. I try to keep up with Star Trek content and man, I don't know how you can bungle up a licensig deal that much.
The latest bit of genius includes Amazon Prime listing three seasons of Lower Decks, but the third season consisting on a page that tells you they don't have that season available, despite having had it before.
There is a fourth season. It's not available anywhere.
I gave up and pirated it, knowing it will eventually show up in a service I do own. It was all getting spoiled for me in social media anyway.
It was all getting spoiled for me in social media anyway.
I thankfully haven’t seen any spoilers for anything since moving to Lemmy… on other sites it’s silly easy to accidentally run into a spoilers for anything remotely popular 😭
Unless you follow ST communities here… then oops I guess spoilers are in your feed for each episode 😳
And you know what? It makes sense. A big part of making a moment of a media launch is to get like-minded people talking about it. It's harder now that media is largely on-demand, so it's great to have a place to go for the discussion afterwards.
Which is why staggered, inconsistent launches make no damn sense in the 21st century. When pirates can deliver a way to join that hype moment and you can't, for the content you're creating on the service your followers are already paying for you have entirely missed the point.
I pretty much only look at All and somehow like a good third of my feed is Star Trek stuff. Mostly memes, and mosty TNG/DS9.
I somewhat enjoy it because I’m not really a big trek fan and it reminds me what it feels like to not be “targeted” by an ad. But ironically, it had the effect of me starting to put on TNG at night.
Would it even require massive changes? The framework is already built for music. The idea behind compulsory licensing is that any radio station can play any music, and the royalty rates due to the copyright holder are set in advance. The music industry fought tooth and nail to prevent streaming sites from getting access to their content, but it’s now their biggest revenue source.
A world where Netflix, Disney, Paramount, Max, and all the others could use each others’ (and literally all) content and pay for every stream would practically kill video piracy almost overnight. Make them all compete on their quality of service, instead of the size of their siloed library. And in the end, both customers and rights-holders would almost certainly be better off.
As a person who doesnt pirate games I hope empress reigns supreme for the rest of eternity. I just get to the cackle at craziest fucking headlines that come out of the game piracy community because of this one person. This one insane fucking person Has this global community bent to their will and you can’t even complain about it because what are you gonna do? Go pay for things? Fuck that noise.
If it were in a movie I would say it’s overwritten. If I didn’t know how crazy people can seriously crazy I would think it’s performance art. It’s the rare perfect storm in modern day where everybody’s doing something wrong so you can point and laugh at the misery of all of the people involved.
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