Your GF is essentially in the "control group" for ads. Her behavior can be compared to the behavior of people who see ads to better understand how ads affect those other users.
In which case she should've been shown noncommercial ads (government services and promotions of YouTube features) instead of no ads so that she would be less likely to notice.
Do you think ads are ethical? For a relevant example, how about an Apple ad that successfully uses emotion to convince you to buy a Mac instead of a Linux computer that would better suit your needs at a better price hypothetically?
Fair enough! I stand on the side that the current ad landscape in the US gravitates towards convincing us to buy things we don’t need and consume more. And normally using manipulative tactics. For example, ads in the car industry that sell a lifestyle that convinces people to buy large pick up trucks they don’t need at costs they can’t actually afford.
I’m not sure it’s worth answering the question because to me it almost feels like a straw man in the sense that it’s disconnected from the current reality. I think running a movie trailer before another movies plays and putting up movie posters around the theater is fair play. It’s within the same context and is actually advertising an entertainment product. Further, people go out of their way to watch movie trailers on YouTube.
However, the majority of ads I’m discussing don’t adhere to that. Overall, people are pretty good about finding out about things! If it’s really desired, some will seek it out. Others will learn via word of mouth. Steam is a good example I think where people find games without having to see ads on TV, online, or other areas.
IMHO, something like "Show HN" is not much different than an ad. In some sense, neither is your resume. They are all about letting people know about options. But I can understand that those can be more contextual than other ads.
Show HN is a great example to bring up! I often find the hacky projects a lot more valuable and worth my time than the ones that are clear adverts.
HN can obviously be gamed, but I think when people ask or share tools they use to solve certain problems, that demonstrates a desire to discover something new showing that there are ways to discover valuable tools without ads. That type of discovery is a lot different from an ad on Instagram for a drop ship company advertising its US roots while repackaging cheap Chinese manufactured products. In the latter example, I feel the ad exists entirely to sell something that is completely unneeded rather than to inform about something the person genuinely could find valuable.
> In the latter example, I feel the ad exists entirely to sell something that is completely unneeded rather than to inform about something the person genuinely could find valuable.
Ironically, this is why "targeted ads" are (in theory) beneficial to both sides. Companies certainly would love to sell you their product -- whether you want it or not. But advertisers would rather show ads to people who will want their product (versus those that don't). This is why Instagram is a powerful platform: it knows a lot about you.
The common privacy concern (which is real, but sometimes overstated) is that the more the advertisers know about you, the worse it is. But "Show HN" is kinda the opposite. That's why you like it more.
In any case, I'm not trying to convince you of anything. I personally see ads as a component of commerce. I'm willing to pay to see fewer ads (like Youtube premium) because I value my time. But I accept that websites that earn money from ads deserve to have them seen.
I get what you’re saying, but I definitely think we just view things from different perspectives. To me targeted ads signal consumerism when I think at a certain point you’ve gotta be happy with what you have. Perhaps a targeted ad can know you need to replace a broken coffee maker. But how would it know yours broke, and why can’t you repair the coffee maker yourself?
When you let marketing run things, you get what’s currently happening with Apple. A decline in software quality alongside products designed to be replaced more frequently than they need to be. It’s worse for consumers as well as the environment.
I certainly align with you on paying for YouTube premium to avoid ads. I’m perfectly happy to pay for goods and services. I just wish I could traverse my city without seeing billboards crammed everywhere and someone always trying to sell me something. It’s a wonder why I enjoy The Rolling Stones’ Satisfaction so much haha.
There is an implicit agreement that using those websites (for free) means you watch ads. I think: if you don't agree with that, then you shouldn't go to those sites.
We complain about "enshitification" -- but then we take away all potential sources of revenue (and refuse to pay). So the only companies that can provide "free" services are ones that are already monetizing you in other ways.
Is there a missing "product" for [easy] "self-hosting" in the cloud? (Or does it exist? Or will it only apply to a narrow kind of user?)
Like I think there should be some way to "one-button-click" install "self-hosted" apps in the cloud, tied to my personal account (and maybe with auth tied to that account). And I pay the usage fees for the cloud (hopefully on a per-request kind of basis, not an always-on server instance).
Is this a thing that I don't know about? Or is the market too narrow to be useful? (Otherwise, why doesn't it already exist?)
> Is this a thing that I don't know about? Or is the market too narrow to be useful? (Otherwise, why doesn't it already exist?)
I'm not super familiar with it, but I think what you describe was/is the goal of Sandstorm (https://sandstorm.org/).
Then there are also efforts like YunoHost (https://yunohost.org/) which are kind of like that, gives SSO auth and everything out of the box for all the apps it supports.
Even easier to use and less involved would be maybe what TrueNAS Core has in terms of apps support, which is essentially also "one-click install" of self-hosted applications, backed by local Kubernetes installation if I remember correctly.
A more involved option for people who want to manage more themselves (both infrastructure and configuration-wise) is using NixOS, which is the approach I chose for my own local infrastructure at home. For the packages supported by NixPkgs, many applications are like ~4 lines of configuration to setup and get integrated with the rest of the apps you run.
All of these options you can run in the cloud, bare-metal or at home servers, afaik.
Huh, interesting as I literally moved from TrueNAS to NixOS because of two reasons 1) not liking something as complicated as Kubernetes for something as simple as home infrastructure and 2) to have a more reproducible setup.
Happy to hear 1 won't be an issue for others in the future :)
The problem is that self hosted apps are rarely designed to be run serverless (why would they be?) and giving each app it’a own VPS or hosted container is going to price out the self-hosted crowd, to the point where you might as well be paying for some cloud software.
In particular, self hosted apps usually are using relational databases or SQLite which need persistent disk so can’t run serverless. They also sometimes require writing to physical disk instead of object storage like S3. Writing or rewriting apps to support serverless when they have no technical need to when self hosting would make things more complicated. Most CRUD frameworks used to write self-hosted apps do not work with NoSQL out of the box.
Thing is, almost every self hosted app supports docker now and so if you like, install portainer on a VPS or NUC or raspberry pi and you’ll be able to set up most self hosted apps easily without touching the command line.
> and giving each app it’a own VPS or hosted container is going to price out the self-hosted crowd,
As far as I know, myself and other self-hosters run these sort of applications/services on home infrastructure or VPSes/dedicated/bare-metal where multiple applications usually share one instance. This could be done with docker, or cgroups, or countless other ways. I'm not sure if that's what you mean with a "hosted container" though, don't think I've heard about that before.
Yes. But that is not what OP comment is asking for. They want one-click. And request based pricing. I was explaining why request based pricing is infeasible and one-click install would price people out (because it would imply a VPS per service).
And I said the same thing at the end of my comment about the way people would host things using docker on a VPS or home server.
> Thing is, almost every self hosted app supports docker now and so if you like, install portainer on a VPS or NUC or raspberry pi and you’ll be able to set up most self hosted apps easily without touching the command line.
Because that’s not one-click setup or priced per request, which was the comment I was responding to was seeking.
And I did say at the end of my comment:
> Thing is, almost every self hosted app supports docker now and so if you like, install portainer on a VPS or NUC or raspberry pi and you’ll be able to set up most self hosted apps easily without touching the command line.
Even decades ago, you could buy a web hosting account and simply click an icon to install Wordpress, CRMs, webmail clients, etc in your account and get started with minimal hassle. There are very likely many of these still around. Of course, if you are not a technical user, you are limited to what they provide.
In the realm of containers, there are also many many choices for this. Most are open source, some are commercial. The problem with all that I know of, is that when you want to use an app that isn't in their "store", or when you want to use it differently than how they have packaged it, either you can't do it because it's not supported, or you essentially have to learn docker from scratch anyway.
Several apps that try to solve this. Good one, but costly, is cloudron.
It allows you to one click install a wide range of self-hosted apps.
Cloudron itself is subscription software that can be installed on own server or many cloud options.
There are many more, though. Things like proxmox with app stores, which are easily installed in most clouds.
I don't know if you can reasonably generalize self hosting.
To a lot of people, self hosting is about getting complete (or effectively complete) control of your data and privacy. That can be compatible with the cloud.
I assume they get "monetization" from Youtube and they don't need to worry about hosting or discovery. Probably better than doing nothing with these films.
The only 2 companies that made money during the “streaming wars” were Netflix, which had the infrastructure in place already and didn’t need to build anything from scratch, and Sony, which decided not to build any streaming service and just license all its content out. Seems WBD is following the lead of a winner.
Is it really following the lead of a winner if you started by building your own failing streaming service, then buying another streaming service and merging them, and only then starting to license out content?
Warner Bros didn't buy out Discovery, other way around really. In return for taking on loads of debt, Discovery got ownership of WB.
HBO Max was an incredibly lean org, around 200-300 engineers at launch, 1/10th the size of its competitors but we launched a similar scaled service (tens of millions of domestic users, followed up by international launches one after another).
IMHO once COVID ended and HBO Max just became a streaming destination instead of having movies "launched" on it, they'd be just fine in terms of profit (and indeed iirc the successor Max service is profitable). First releasing big block busters doesn't drive enough user growth to pay for the movie, but if you have an existing content pipeline then having a streaming service as another delivery platform becomes reasonable.
Agreed on all counts, Discovery is the company I was referring to and Discovery+ was the 'failing' platform, not HBO Max. Though to be fair my recollection was hazy and the story around Discovery+ is not that simple given that it has stuck around post merge and is profitable according to Zaslav. I don't really trust his definition of profitable given his general love for accounting fuckery but the fact that its running is something.
As an aside, props to the team. It's been a while but I remember being pleasantly surprised after getting shuffled over from HBO GO. It's even more impressive to know it was such a small team compared to other services.
Max has gone to crap since the merger though. They cancelled a lot of the quality content and added a bunch of cheap and awful crap like reality shows to the service. It's like someone bought a Rolls Royce and riced it out.
It was ATT that fired all the old HBO bosses that curated for quality. They just dumped their failed experiment onto Discovery to squeeze out whatever was left.
Much like Spotify; it took them many, many years to achieve only a 7% profit margin. Meanwhile, UMG runs at 16%.
The only company that actually makes good money from being a content middleman is, somehow, YouTube. I don't know how they do it. YouTube is among the greatest businesses in human history.
How they did it: economy of scale, and mingling businesses.
Google had the infrastructure, expertise, experience, and an army of top tier coders to execute on any engineering challenger, all of that even before it acquired YouTube.
Google is mainly an ads business. An expertise edge not only in engineering at large scale, but also in the delivery of web ads. And, given their ads business perform on profiling people, YouTube consumption habits feed the rest of the beast.
If these didn't skip your kind, yet still wondering how did they do it, the following were crucial to make Google unique in their ability to succeed with YouTube (and the rest)
- An engineering first company. They hire wagons of product people and managers, but when things don't turn out positive they switch back to their roots. As an anecdote, on day the CEO felt things were going south. Fired all (probably just most) managers and tasked engineers to figure things out.
- A coherent vision. Google doesn't jump on where's the hype. Their position in A.I recently perhaps couldn't resist the pressure. It sticks to the core competencies while building experimental products on green fields that fit in growing the core business.
- Long term. Clearly Google has so far resisted to make a quick buck. The no evil slogan is gone, but the spirit remain in building long term value. That kept them from tarnishing their reputation while reaping the amounts of profits once everyone could only swear by their products (mail, drive, YouTube, of course search, Android thriving as now the only remaining competitor to iOS, if any other company had acquired Android in that shape when Google swooped it, it would have given up on it seeing how long the road was about to take to make it a viable mobile consumer product)
How did they do it? Google is in the top 5 of all companies that have ever existed. Takes more than a genius and plenty of humbleness to achieve this feat.
Because YouTube has found a way to monetize the work of it's content creators. Online influencers are incentivized to make videos to get paid and YouTube has reduced their costs enough to make it worthwhile.
In addition to that, whenever users are just starting out, their videos still get ad rolls but the creator doesn't get any money. That's millions of new videos every day that Youtube can monetize until those creators are eligible to collect the checks for themself (if ever).
Also, YouTube does aggressive caching of very old videos that have very few views. You might need to wait 10 seconds for YT to fetch the video from cold storage before watching, but in the grand scheme of things, it's worth it to them.
I'm a little surprised there isn't more of this. Building a streaming service is pretty expensive.. a lot of the platforms lost money doing so and really only made it back when they merged into an umbrella of other services.
I'm also a little surprised no one has yet (AFAIK) done the "viral indie release to Youtube" path. I feel like it's sitting there waiting to be exploited.
"I'm also a little surprised no one has yet (AFAIK) done the "viral indie release to Youtube" path. I feel like it's sitting there waiting to be exploited."
There's a lot of "indies releasing things to YouTube directly". However, they're limited both by the algorithm and by the amount of money they can generate by that, so you get a fairly restricted set of genres that this can work with, like sketch comedy or (perhaps a bit surprisingly to me) science documentaries, like Veritasium or Practical Engineering.
These are basically indie filmmakers doing a very indie thing that doesn't fit anywhere else.
Movies are, after all, as affected by their release technology as anything else. There's a reason they're all 80-130 minutes, and they have their own genre restrictions as a result of it, especially if you think of it in terms not just of binary possibility but how popular things are. It isn't reasonable to expect a very different distribution method to result in "movies" you'd recognize from the cinema any more than it is reasonable to expect that television would only ever have run "movies" and never developed its own genres that don't work in cinema. Taking into account the need for the content to match its distribution there's a ton of indie stuff on YouTube. What I would say you are really seeing is the restrictiveness of "The Algorithm", and that is an interesting question to ponder on its own.
In a similar vein, I remember reading somewhere that creating shows for direct-to-streaming is liberating because, although it is quite similar to TV in that it's telling a story in chunks (usually 30 to 60 minutes) without a guarantee of continuation (renewal), you don't have the primary constraints of traditional television: fitting into a specific time slot, saving time for commercials, and creating hooks that lead neatly into each ad break to get the audience to stick around.
You see this often with Apple TV+ shows. Some episodes are only 40~ minutes while the very next one might be 70. They can scope the episode to only include the content that is required for that story and extend the runtime when they need to include extra details or scenes to make everything flow nicely.
For most viewers, the discretion is worthwhile for better storytelling.
Part of this is that YouTube makes this viable only for creators whose inbound viewers are likely to stay to watch a majority of the content; otherwise, the algorithm penalizes your content for every "bounce." A comedy short that'll attract people who like comedy shorts, and will be over before many people bounce? A long-form science documentary that's likely only going to be clicked by someone who wants to watch a long-form science documentary? Both meet this criterion. But any kind of traditional filmmaking with longer character arcs will be penalized, and that's a really hard thing to see for your creation's primary distribution channel.
Vimeo has tried to prioritize indie feature discovery from what I can tell. Not sure what its ownership or business is. Also not sure how it compares to (in music) soundcloud's or bandcamp's approaches.
I would think this is creating discovery effects specific to indie filmmakers who are doing "a very indie thing that doesn't fit anywhere else" like GP comment said
Rooster Teeth (of "Red vs Blue" and "RWBY" fame) did the "indie filmmaker on youtube" thing pretty successfully. Eventually they moved to their own site, then fell apart after a lot of drama and internal differences.
Also vaguely guestures at all of youtube. Most youtube creators are independent, and a lot of them have higher production value than indie movies. You just don't recognize them because of how the algorithm and monetization favor regular installments of ~10 minute episodes, causing most content to take that form. A documentary simply works better on youtube as a Tom Scott video than as a 45 minute piece (though there are plenty of those too)
Movie rights will be a big factor also. Events like TIFF, Cannes etc, while being a platform to show films is also where deals are done, distribution rights are signed always for different territories etc.
YouTube is essentially international which may invalidate some pre-existing licence and distribution agreements.
Youtube has the ability to limit videos to certain markets. One example is that the entirety of Mythbusters was uploaded in the past couple years, but isn't available to view in the US.
Movies are capital intensive, a movie is less likely to go viral than a video that is made to be viral. Thus, doing this is risky. Also, people wanting to create viral movies probably do not want to make viral videos.
These old movies have already made their money. Anything they can get now is just gravy.
It’s a Wonderful Life is popular because the copyright expired and TV stations could play it for free. Playing it so much got people to watch, and now it’s a classic. It bombed originally.
Putting old movies on YouTube gives them a chance at a second life, and the studio doing it, means they can still earn some money on something that would otherwise just sit in a vault somewhere.
I have a list of movies you can't find anywhere, not even for pay, not even on on obscure services. I check every once in a while to see if they pop up (JustWatch.us is great for this, IMDB is copying). Example: "Amateur" by Hal Hartley, though it's easy enough to buy copies on DVD.
The problem is once the rights for a title end up in a library, the accessibility considerations operate at the library level, not the title level. So if some company owns the rights to "n" titles en masse, they're negotiating for the distribution rights to that library.
You can't really pull a Taylor Swift or Def Leppard "re-record for rights" move with movies.
UPDATE: Happy to be wrong about my cited example.. Thanks @andsoitis !
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browningstreet 43 minutes ago | root | parent | next [–]
I have a list of movies you can't find anywhere, not even for pay, not even on on obscure services. I check every once in a while to see if they pop up (JustWatch.us is great for this, IMDB is copying). Example: "Amateur" by Hal Hartley, though it's easy enough to buy copies on DVD.
At a finer grain than general "permission", a lot of the issue is with the music. For many pre-streaming movies, the original soundtrack will have been licensed in a way that supported resale but didn't foresee streaming. Making those movies available for streaming would involve tracking down the copyright holders for every piece of music (often the estates or successors of the original composer, but often non-determinate) and renegotiating a licensing deal.
Yeah there are just a lot of titles with weird rights situations that no one cares about resolving. Maybe you lost clearance on a song in the movie, or one of the actors has a clause in their contract, or some company bought the distribution rights for a certain territory and then went out of business.
Lots of situations where resolving the rights issues is going to cost more than you expect the movie to bring in, especially once you start talking about splitting the revenue with online storefronts.
As someone who has built a streaming service, I’m always amazed how much money the studios throw at it and don’t have something good or profitable. The infra cost for my service was then 10% of revenue. I just wish the huge consolidation hadn’t happened, now all of the studios are too protective of their content.
If anyone has ideas for re-purposing or re-targeting a streaming service, I’m all ears.
Go for international movies. A lot of them have incredibly convoluted rights, so the biggest expense is going to be negociations, but if you can become a destination to find obscure films from varied countries, it might be possible to eke out a slice of the pie.
Could you please expand on your "viral indie release to Youtube" idea? I am just a YT basic user and don't know what is there and what is not beyond HN, random videos, and my relatively simple use cases (e.g. music videos, and movie trailers).
I get that the real issue isn't just YouTube, but that no other horror film, or otherwise, has really matched Blair Witch Project's combination of impact, marketing success, micro-budget, and cultural phenomenon.
I just speculate that if Blair Witch Project were made today, it would likely debut on a platform like YouTube before gaining wider recognition.
The best example I can think of is already mentioned up-thread, but just to drill down on that. Kung Fury[1] was initially released on Youtube (and a few other services, mostly in other countries I think) and became a pretty big viral hit. Enough so that the filmmaker eventually signed a deal to make a sequel[2] with distribution by a traditional film company and some big-name stars. Unfortunately the release of the sequel has been held up for "legal reasons" and FSM only knows when or if it will see the light of day. :-(
Anyway, not as big as BWP, but still a decent example of the concept under discussion, I think.
Just because the quality of the things people upload there isn't up to the arbitrary standards of "as good as the Blair Witch Project" doesn't mean its less valuable
I would argue KanePixels (Kane Parsons) is doing the Indie filmmaker thing very successfully on YouTube. He went from creating a viral hit with his interpretation of The Backrooms, signed a deal with A24, and has continued releasing his own horror short films in the interim. The format isn't the standard 90-120 minutes of most studio movies but his longest videos are nearly an hour long and with each narrative spread across several videos, stitching the whole thing together would look something like a conventional film
I've seen a few things go that route - Hazbin Hotel was a YouTube pilot ish thing and got picked up on Amazon, I think amazing digital circus got grabbed by someone too.
No one seems to stay on YouTube when it happens though.
I think you missed a decade or two. This was already a thing and the mainstream didn't exactly have the appetite for it. Check out 'web series' on Wikipedia.
I don't know what you're into but "The Guild" is pretty excellent example of the form.
> Building a streaming service is pretty expensive..
It's not. At least not for companies of that size. There is PeerTube for that: https://joinpeertube.org/. It can even decrease the load to your servers by spreading the trafic over peers.
Which problems are you expecting if you already have the content, the servers and the software? It's a famous company; people would definitely watch their movies for a small payment or with ads.
as a 2nd order effect, crowds out the competition: every 90 minutes spent watching a low value film of yours is time not spent watching anything of the competition.
If it's like a regular YT video and monetized as such, there's going to be regular ad breaks... which effectively makes it just like watching a film on cable TV, and I suspect the amount they would earn is similar. Although iirc a cable channel would pay a fixed amount for the syndication rights, then their profit would be from ads in turn, in this case the profits would go straight to the publisher after Youtube takes its cut.
It's also the same channel they put their new trailers on, so the increased watch time should really help with getting their other videos recommended more.
Have there been any recent books that try to reconstruct what pre-Columbian South America was like?
I know that 1491 was a pretty good book about this. But it's like 20 years old now. And Lidar seems to have really opened up new insights in the past decade or so.
Not South America, but the story of Moncacht-Apé (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moncacht-Ap%C3%A9) is a fascinating—if slightly dubious—primary source describing his journey across North America immediately prior to European contact. I found a copy of his account as told to a French colonial officer on Amazon, and it looked like it was printed on a laser printer.
Cabeza de Vaca spent 1528–1536 wandering through the Southwest, living with multiple indigenous tribes. His experiences ranged from enslavement to becoming a medicine man. His firsthand account, Naufragios, is available, but I highly recommend A Land So Strange by Andrés Reséndez for a more accessible read. De Vaca also had a second adventure in South America, but it’s not as well-documented.
Another great read is River of Darkness by Buddy Levy, which covers Francisco Orellana’s journey down the Amazon. His expedition was roughly contemporary to Cabeza de Vaca’s own jungle survival story—though Orellana was a bit more conquistadorial than De Vaca.
I’d also love to see a proper follow-up to 1491 (1493 doesn’t count!). The closest thing we have might be America Before by Graham Hancock, which incorporates recent LiDAR discoveries—but it leans more into speculation than hard archaeology.
I'd be curious about South America as well as North America.
I found Pekka Hämäläinen's Indigenous Continent to be a worthwhile history of North America, although mostly it was focused on events during European exploration of North America with a relatively short initial section about the state of civilization prior to the Spanish arrival.
There is "America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization", from 2019 by Graham Hancock. But while Graham Hancock refers to lots of real research, he also mixes in his own unverified ideas and theories. In that sense, Charles C. Mann is a more serious reporter than Hancock.
