I respect Rossman's pov but I have a different one.

Mine is fuck alphabet, fuck them to hell with a 10 foot clown pole. I will vote with my wallet and never give them a cent, I feel gross enough already even just *using* any service owned by them.
They are typical giant corporation who corrupt everything they touch.
I reckon for every hour of valuable software work that makes its way to the public, 50 hours of bullshit managerial "work" is done by a sucession of gobshites with increasingly inflated salaries.

What actual value do they add? All the features and innovations they have made since acquiring youtube have been uniformly terrible, the best example is their pathetic attempt to ape tiktok with youtube shorts, so now they have two totally different systems awkwardly smooshed together on the same platform. They also, in classic Google fashion just randomly change the UI or randomly remove extremely useful publishing features for no reason on a weekly basis. They've pushed more and more ads. Theyve moderated and used the suggested videos features to encourage content farm garbage and punish actually good original content.

Now, they do run the servers, the storage and bandwidth. And I have seen people including Rossman arguing, that sure running twitter is cheap cus its just text, but *video* is different. Has anyone actually looked at the price of storage and bandwidth recently? Theyre vastly cheaper than theyve ever been. Just for example Amazon s3 would charge $0.02 per GB of data transfer, and thats for their flexible service aimed at small hobbyist apps that they make a tidy profit on. A service with the economies of scale of Youtube, running their own server farms serving only youtube videos could probably attain costs many orders of magnitude less. Video *is* thousands of times more expensive than text but it's still not that bad, data is just cheap af, I reckon it's nowhere near the $20 per month per user they are asking for.

The real value of youtube is the amazing content creators who make world beating content for free. The actually good ones are mostly demonetized by youtube and either make zero money or only make money from Patreon supporters.
So the actual value of youtube is the content creators, and also the audience who go there to watch. Youtube has been around for a long time and is basically *the place* to upload longer videos. Alphabet gained control of this value by buying youtube and since then they have sat on this communally created value and simply engaged in rent seeking behaviour.

It's amazing that people don't use adblockers. I haven't seen a ad on the internet for like 10 years.

ublock origin installed on chrome still works