one of the only good things about the stage of capitalism that we're in right now is that the capitalists are complete fucking idiots with no instincts for the preservation of their class. the competence has been fully bred out of them Habsburg-style at this point

Death to America

It's a shame the ruling class can't agree on anything if it gets in the way of their short term returns.

That's assuming Capital exists as a single centrally planned homogenate, rather than a set of competing factions all warring over the stream of revenue that media consumers produce. We did once try something akin to this, with the Public Broadcasting Service. And it was very successful, at least for a little while, in its effort to command a large audience and manipulate public opinion along a liberal ideological view.

But now we have a much more Anarcho-Capitalist approach to infotainment. We've implemented a tiered and tranched distribution of media services, from Talk Radio on the bottom-of-the-barrel free feed to Pay-Per-View streaming services on the high end. They all serve the same fundamental role as Netflix/Youtube, but the lower tiers tend to have a more vulgar and poorly produced advertising methodology.

And people still consume these channels voraciously. No shortage of folks who will suffer through five minute YouTube ads or who eventually buckle to the "Please Pay Me!!" pop-ups that soft gate the service. Similarly, Netflix has no trouble maintaining a subscriber pool of a quarter billion registered accounts (with households averaging north of 2 viewers).

The payment model serves two purposes. It forces people to register their participation - through an online account - and allows digital tagging and tracking of consumption habits. It also provides a threat of deprivation to disobedient proles. If you don't clock in, you won't have enough money to pay your bills. That includes entertainment. The cost isn't particularly prohibitive, even to the poorest economic cohorts. But you are required to buy in and sign up and maintain the account, which puts an onus on people to keep in the good graces of the capitalist managers.

As a wise man once said, if you're good at something never do it for free.

But how are the investors supposed to make money off of it?!

i firmly believe it's the interest rate hike. the fed rate has been set to "free money" since the GFC in 2007.

[aside from a little blip between 2016 and COVID when rates were gradually increased up to a whopping 2% over 4 years before being flattened to "free money" when COVID hit].

now, in less than 1.5 years, it's gone from "free money" to 5.5%. that's enough to make "investors" [aka, people who negotiate giant loans from investment banks to invest in companies] squeamish about negotiating additional operating loans and pressuring executives to find money under the couch cushions, so to speak..

to be fair, i think the enshittification process of trying to squeeze a buck out of everything was inevitable to capitalism, but the rise of interest rates so high over such a short window set a fire under it.

it was never profitable. Its all sort of been a big scam from the beginning

my guess is that gulf state monarchy investors (Saudi, Qatar, UAE etc) haven't been satisfied with the profit margins and are demanding more control over the companies, whereas American/European investors are possibly more focused on market share

could be rising competition from Chinese tech companies as well

It could also be a collapsing bubble where everyone's realizing personal data sold to advertising companies isn't as valuable as everyone assumed it was 15 years ago. They ran out of people to scoop data from. Everyone's already got every possible type of targeted ad pointed directly at their eyeballs 24/7. The market is cornered and there's nothing left to speculate on

Apparently Google does not reveal YouTube profitability: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/03/google-still-isnt-telling-us-about-youtube-and-cloud-profits.html

I think this is normal Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall stuff

Trying to find the seasons of the One Piece anime that haven't been uploaded to Netflix yet (and were taken down from Crunchyroll and Funimation) turned me into the King of the Pirates.

massive backlog of content, only place creators can easily make money from uploading vids I'm pretty sure, so the big creators will never switch, and a lot of smaller creators have at least a fantasy of making it big if their vids go viral, if not a goal. Honestly a government would have to step in a break up YT at this point, it's got a monopoly on vids and I don't think any platform will ever be able to break it tbh.

Video hosting is expensive is the main reason. Only google has the money and they can't even make it profitable

That's the place where the videos are

Whats stopping them? A couple things, is my guess.

How many hours of garbage are uploaded there, every minute? The bar for entry is nonexistent. All you need is a webcam.

YouTube will lose its crown eventually but there is nothing waiting in the wings as a replacement. Yet.

People did try to leave in the late 2000s/early 2010s

I remember when all the big critics (which were popular style of video at the time) movied to Blip.TV

Used to be that way, and we definitely blocked ads then too. Having seizure flashes in the corner of your eye is incredibly annoying

They are slowly rolling it out; the reports have been trickling in for the past few weeks. Last I heard was firefox users getting hit. Apparently not even uBlock is immune.

“Enshittification” is the academic term for the phenomenon