YouTube

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• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  there were three founders of youtube most people say oh yeah you know i remember chad hurley and then there was steve uh who's the third and it was a really smart um gentleman named uh javid kareem i've met him a bunch of times really smart really thoughtful and uh when he this was 2006 2007 uh he went back to school he wanted to go back to stanford and finish up okay so he only got one-fifth of his founding shares and the company was bought like a year or two later by google famously for 1.6 bi

• bullish assessment Jason Calacanis

  I think it's a bigger play.

• bullish assessment Thomas McInerney

  Last time I was on the show, you mentioned the value of YouTube. That's sort of, you know, kind of hidden. I mean, I think they have a lot of great technology and assets that are, you know, kind of under the water that people don't necessarily think about.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  youtube was not the first video file sharing site it was the 1000th it's the execution

• bearish criticism Jason Calacanis

  this is why YouTube makes me a little nervous even investing in their ecosystem, is because you're right, Marco. Like, they could just delist you and you spent a year building on it and you're just like, oh, where's my channel? And then you had no recourse. You can't even, there's nobody to talk, I mean, I can, I'm Jason Calacanis, I can email Susan Wojcicki if I want to and she's going to respond or else I'm going to go ham on Twitter or something. But, you know, if you're just a civilian or so

• neutral fact_claim Marco Arment

  If you want to have video out there in the world that anybody sees, you pretty much have to agree to whatever YouTube dictates.

• bearish criticism Marco Arment

  And you can compare it to something like YouTube, where if you want to make video that matters at all today, it has to be on YouTube, basically. And so that you have this one company, this one platform, controlling the, by far, like the majority of this really important medium.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  there's an explosion in the number of skills that people are learning online obviously you see like a lot of these creator economy platforms where people who aren't even part of the tech industry are learning how to like make amazing videos on youtube or tiktok or become great streamers or open up shopify stores and are making lots of money providing lots of value for people because these platforms exist to make them sort of amplified versions of themselves

• bullish endorsement Shishir Mehrotra

  So I think Susan and her team are doing a great job doing whatever they can

• bullish assessment Shishir Mehrotra

  everybody knows that if YouTube feels more fair, then people are much more willing to participate.

• mixed assessment Shishir Mehrotra

  we now have thousands of people making their livings off this platform, generally doing something they love doing. Um, but of course now it's easy to look the other side of it and say the responsibility comes with it and the obligations come with it.

• neutral assessment Shishir Mehrotra

  every business goes through three phases. First, you're a joke. Uh, nobody believes in you. Then you're a threat. Everybody's scared of you. And then you're obvious. And everybody just presumes what you're going to do is going to work and everything flips around and all you can do is wrong. And, you know, I got to YouTube when we were clearly a joke, like you said, as big lawsuits and so on. And I think I, uh, I was there and we got to lead it through that joke to threat period. And I think I le

• bearish criticism Shishir Mehrotra

  the challenge with that question for YouTube is because this Farm League, Pro League thing, the best ones leave, right? And so, you know, what, what, what are the best, the people that grew up on, on YouTube, where do they actually make their money?

• bullish assessment Shishir Mehrotra

  it's still the case that YouTube is the only truly open platform out there that pays people money, um, at, at any reasonable level, um, and will pay just about anybody, uh, money.

• mixed assessment Shishir Mehrotra

  I mean, the analogy you drew there is one at YouTube used to call this farm league pro league, which is the YouTube is a wonderful to use the baseball analogy is a wonderful, wonderful farm league. I mean, so many musicians, comedians, you know, and all sorts of people that got their start there, there's zero wall to get, to get up and get spread and so on. And then one of the things that always kind of frustrated us at YouTube was we didn't, we never really did a great job with the pro league w

• neutral assessment Shishir Mehrotra

  I think one of the challenges is these companies, the YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, it actually isn't, it is well aligned with their incentive to be known to be nutritious, not delicious. It's just very hard to do.

• neutral fact_claim Shishir Mehrotra

  We had a person in Thailand who went to jail, not because of her video, but because there was a comment on her video that she didn't moderate fast enough. And it happened to be criticizing the king of Thailand.

• neutral fact_claim Shishir Mehrotra

  There's no way to take hundreds of hours per minute that are uploaded to YouTube and do anything that is actually, can be held to a approval first test. Just wouldn't work.

• bearish criticism Cade Metz

  What they, what, what the study shows is that people who viewed those videos, it was kind of an on-ramp to more extreme videos on YouTube. They could, and they can, they could track it, right? You know, user by user. And that's, that's the type of concern, um, that is discussed in my piece.

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  According to Susan Wojiecki, who is the CEO of YouTube, they've paid out 30 billion to creators from 2018 to 2020. So this is about $10 billion a year, I'm sure it's more weighted towards 2020. This is pretty incredible when you think about that economy and how powerful those YouTubers are getting.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  YouTube added a subscribe feature, because a lot of YouTubers were creating Patreons. So they took Patreon, they built it into YouTube, YouTube actually has, I think three ways to monetize. One is advertising, duh, but that's not great on YouTube, because they kind of get low CPMs. And they have so many views that any one creator doesn't make that much money, then they have like stickers and super chats. So if there's a live showing going on, or whatever, you can give a super chat, you can basic

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  the nature of the internet, people will always be more and more outrageous. Um, for, for views. But it's up to YouTube to say, Look, even if you're allowing them to continue on the platform, don't put them in your preferred ad network, don't do marketing for them, right? Like don't put them in your ad campaign and in your end of your rewind video, like maybe those shouldn't be the people that you should highlight.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  I mean, I think if they cared, they would have not like rewarded these people with millions and millions of followers.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  I called her out on Twitter. I was like, you should not allow people doing these stunts on YouTube, their accounts should be instantly turned off. If they do a stunt that's dangerous, because people were hanging off buildings, and a number of them fell off. It's so gnarly. That it just I mean, I hate to be cynical, but I don't think YouTube cares all that much about this.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  know, like, which is like the main thing that you that YouTube has over these big creators is like giving them access to the premium ads. And so the big punishment that a lot of them have gotten when they do something bad is like, Oh, you're kicked out of our Google, you know, preferred network. So yeah, I do think it's on YouTube.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  young people do stupid stuff. But they're doing it on YouTube to make money. And that to me seems to be that makes YouTube culpable. Am I you agree with me on that? Like they're culpable if they're monetizing Dobrik's content, they are his partner and they're endorsing him and they're promoting him. Therefore, they are responsible for his behavior on the platform.

• mixed assessment Taylor Lorenz

  I kind of think of YouTube for kids, which I know has had its problems. But it's like, actually, it's a safer experience, right? It's more closed experience.

• bullish assessment Jason Calacanis

  So YouTube is a major driver here.

• bullish assessment Jason Calacanis

  YouTube grew revenue almost 100% year over year 80% year over year growth is just extraordinary for a large business.

• bullish assessment Jason Calacanis

  YouTube, I believe in and of itself is a trillion dollar company sitting inside Google

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  But Amazon, or let's say YouTube, the better example, 80% year over year growth. Sure. That's kind of startup level growth, you know, like later stage startup growth.

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  It's now just $600 million more in the last quarter than than YouTube. So YouTube is about to kind of surpass this critical old piece of of Google revenue. But the the YouTube gains were very impressive.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  7 billion both this quarter.

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  It's getting close to Netflix and revenue scale, which is simply the same, right?

• bearish criticism David Friedberg

  It's brutal. I use an ad blocker. And the only time I feel guilty about it is what I'm on, like a journalist site.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  there were places where you could rent storage online uh and data centers where they would manage the storage for you and then youtube realized well instead of charging people to upload their videos what if we made it free what would happen before that you had to buy a server or buy a certain amount of server space to upload your video and if your video got watched by a lot of people then you got a bill for ten thousand dollars because so many people watch your video and in the early days of the

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  which is exactly what youtube did there were many youtubes before youtube

• bearish criticism Brendan Carr

  YouTube can demonetize individuals who have risked their capital and invested their labor to build online businesses.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  I remember Dropbox and YouTube were based upon the premise that all this dark fiber and all of the storage had suddenly become really cheap and it was plummeting in cost. Therefore there was more available. Therefore the idea of hosting somebody's video for free on YouTube became viable. Whereas previously you had to pay every time somebody watched your video, you had to pay your hosting company for it. Yes. It became free when it became free.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  Or YouTube was this independent $400 billion company that didn't have to worry about what was going on with Google search or the Google ad network.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  This is the one company that challenges Meta's supremacy and will continue to do so. YouTube would be the other, right? Just as the world moves to video in shorts.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  Adding another feature may not increase consumption. Why? Because only 5% of people may use that feature like playback speed.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  YouTube learned where the new features were not as important as making the core feature work better. So what is the core feature of YouTube? Uploading videos, sharing videos, watching videos and then recommending videos. If you look at those core set of videos, anybody who produces for YouTube knows it's really easy to upload a video. Even to do a live stream is dead simple now. And to watch a video on YouTube couldn't possibly be easier and faster. You've probably all had this experience. You a

• mixed assessment David Sacks

  if where you wound up was on youtube the intellectual dark web or you know worse um that's bad right and there was a specific case uh with ben shapiro and if you watch ben shapiro's content and listen he pushes the envelope on being anti-trans and you know edgy sort of positioning uh socially you might then get um like milo yiannopoulos who went from being like a kind of a cheeky blogger when i met him in the 2000s and to being like straight up like hanging out with white supremacists you know a

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  YouTube was free, it was fast, it was simple, YouTube won the day.

• bearish fact_claim Chamath Palihapitiya

  according to low to me uh they estimated that facebook twitter youtube and snapchat quote lost 12 of revenue in the third fourth quarters or 9.85 billion i'm not sure how they get to that financial times notes that may be conservative they also know google is not as impacted which is interesting now why is google not impacted pretty obvious if you think about it google you type a word in a box and the word is typically what you're looking for right you don't search for something you're not looki

• neutral assessment Chamath Palihapitiya

  youtube twitter and snapchat are you know minor players in this huge advertising machine

• bearish fact_claim Chamath Palihapitiya

  facebook twitter youtube and snapchat will lose about 10 billion dollars in revenue uh in half of 2021 due to apple's new privacy changes

• neutral fact_claim Matt Koval

  i've always thought seeing the number of dislikes on a video helps us know as viewers if it's a good video or not if it's a helpful tutorial or not or if what a creator is is saying in their video is generally agreed with or not but unfortunately research teams at youtube have found there's this whole other use for disliking a video that i had never experienced as a creator and you may not have either apparently groups of viewers are targeting a video's dislike button to drive up the count turni

• bullish assessment David Friedberg

  YouTube grew revenue almost a hundred percent year over year, 80% year over year growth is just extraordinary for a large business. Let's break down how YouTube compares to Netflix, two seemingly very different businesses, but who line up kind of interestingly, their ad revenue was 7 billion up 83% year over year. The 7 billion is pretty close to Netflix's Q2 revenue, which was 7.3 billion. I think it's great for us to look at these two businesses. Netflix has 10 times less users than YouTube. T

• bullish assessment Chamath Palihapitiya

  Or the counterfactual is maybe you YouTube would have gone out of business because of the lawsuits and the bandwidth bills. From the inside, my friend rule off was the person who did that deal. And so, you know, just based on the best deal memo ever, best deal memo ever. Yeah, pretty good one. If you look at, you know, the YouTube deal, you know, they were in such a huge lawsuit at the time, the money, the smart money predicted it was going under, because of the bandwidth bills, which were signi

• mixed assessment Jason Calacanis

  But that was an acquisition that that unquestionably, $1.6 billion, you know, consolidated a lot more data and information inside of Google, but also maybe reduced how big YouTube could have been.

• bearish criticism Chamath Palihapitiya

  YouTube, you used to reach all your followers and subscribers all the time, then they decide, you know, how many of your subscribers you show up on their main feed, right.

• bullish assessment David Friedberg

  If Tick Tock had the same partnership with creators that YouTube has, Tick Tockers would be making at minimum 16 cents per thousand views.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  Whereas YouTube, which we used to think was crazy, pays creators 55% of their ad revenue.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  too many ads, too many ads. And you have to make these really long, boring videos because 10 minutes now is the standard for a YouTube video so that you can get like two ad breaks in there

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  a million view video on YouTube could make two to $7,000 in advertising from YouTube and YouTube. It was very low at the beginning was sub $1. And then it slowly went up as they got more advertisers and they increase the number of ads.

• bullish endorsement David Friedberg

  And like, as but one example, I'm a big Knickerbocker fan. I love my Knicks. And my fan CP, the franchise, a franchise, created Knicks fan TV on YouTube after every game. And then once a week, and when this breaking news, he talks about the Knicks. And you know, he has a community just like we do here on YouTube. And I've met all these friends. And they have this like super chat feature. We don't turn around here because we have advertising, we don't need the money. But where you can double clic

• bullish endorsement Jason Calacanis

  I'm like, okay, there will be 10 to 20,000 videos on YouTube that are good or 200,000 videos on how to build a sauna. So I just I like, I find it all so fascinating in terms of creating options.

• bullish endorsement David Friedberg

  Anytime I have a problem with a device, I don't even like when I was just unpacking a humidifier because it's up in the mountains and it's dry air. And I was like, Okay, I'm going to try to set this up just, you know, by looking at it. And then I was just like, I typed the name of the company, you know, set up on YouTube. Boom, there's a video, I go to that video, I put it on 2x speed, I didn't even look at the manual. And then you have a problem with your dishwasher or whatever device it is, yo

• bullish prediction Unattributed

  I could see YouTube being a big win. I agree that they, if they really took this seriously and they just actually, there's a really easy way to do it. Actually, there's a really easy way for them to take this seriously. They should just put podcasts along the left-hand side. And when they have trending, they should have a podcast tab. And just by doing that, all the podcasts are like, well, I got to be on the, I got to be on the ranking. So if they did their own podcast ranking charts, just copy

• bullish endorsement Jason Calacanis

  Transcripts and captions are huge.

• bearish fact_claim Unattributed

  YouTube doesn't want to trigger that for 2 billion people globally. That'd be a big price tag.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  the way I knew they were getting more serious about podcasting at YouTube is when they added the 2x speed.

• bearish fact_claim Unattributed

  they have to pay for that because they have a music license deal.

• bullish prediction Unattributed

  in Canada, they made background listening free on YouTube music. Seemingly like a trial experiment. Again, we're speculating here, but I would not be surprised if they're seeing what happens there and then going to make it free everywhere else.

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  they hired their first dedicated podcast person. It sounds small, but that's like a big deal in our world.

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  on YouTube, you put a video up, you turn on monetization. And if you hit a certain number of subscribers, I think they'll let you in the program and you're off to the races.

• mixed assessment Unattributed

  YouTube is ahead of the ball, even though they kind of haven't really done much here.

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  I pay for YouTube. And it's absolutely fantastic. If you don't pay for YouTube's ad free service, it's awesome.

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  Oh, I think so. It's a long term gain in terms of competition because clearly Tik Tok has shown that people just want to like, burp burp burp burp, just turn this through tons and tons and tons of short videos.

• mixed prediction Unattributed

  Advertisers are always a couple of years in terms of the content format. Then the creators, the creators are the avant garde. They're making these short clips. They understand how to make it in a tall format as opposed to a landscape. All the ads in the world are made for TV format landscape. Now you're asking some creative agency. Okay. I need somebody to look close up to the camera. I need you to make these really hard cuts and make them look like, you know, whatever, and you need to make ads

• mixed fact_claim Unattributed

  We're experiencing a slight headwind to revenue growth as shorts viewership grows as a percentage of total YouTube time. We are testing monetization on shorts and early advertiser feedback and results are encouraging. And the team is focused on closing the gap with traditional YouTube ads over time. So we're excited about the new opportunities with shorts, but a slight headwind.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  The ads don't work as well. And they can't get as many in there because it's only however long.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  The ads don't work as well.

• bearish fact_claim Unattributed

  The growth of shorts has had a negative revenue impact on YouTube.

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  tick tock in the world of tick tock, right? Which is short and super fast moving. And YouTube had leaned heavily into longer form content to put more ads in there. Now they're admitting that the growth of, of shorts, YouTube shorts, which is now averaging over 30 billion views daily. Is it really? Wow. That is going crazy.

• mixed assessment Unattributed

  The, the YouTube miss is interesting because YouTube is sort of trying to find its way as a

• bearish fact_claim Unattributed

  but they missed on YouTube by 500 million. Yeah. Um, and so ad revenue is actually down quarter over quarter from Q4, which is not uncommon because of the big push to spend money during the holidays. Uh, but is uncommon for Google, which, you know, so that that's a seasonality thing, but

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  YouTube is at 6.86 billion around up to 7 billion. And, um, searches at 39.5 billion rounded up to 40. Uh, and what you're seeing is, you know, YouTube is a very significant portion of the revenue,

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  there are more people being paid to dance on youtube or you know other platforms

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  they set up youtube to be highly you know independent and susan mojeki is uh you know ceo for that reason so that they can make their own decisions

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  i will say get the youtube premium do you have youtube premium for whatever bucks a month to take the

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  i am surprised none of the larger sites have been able to make a youtube competitor it seems to me that it would be possible to build a you know a youtube competitor um but i'm surprised people haven't

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  youtube still honestly youtube's achilles tendon still is killer it's it's achilles heel thanks yeah is um which i think the heel i think it's actually is it's achilles tendon like nobody ever says achilles tendon because heel sounds cooler but what it really means is you cut that tendon you can't walk anymore you're done yes yes as we know all too well oh poor clay oh but he's back he had a good game he's back he's back we're done just still it's just ptsd just ptsd a lot of ptsd yeah i i can't

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  my question is why don't they have a youtube shorts dedicated app for just creating yeah and just consuming there should be a dedicated app just for this and they should just do shorts and they should make it youtube shorts so if you want to waste time and just do that you can and then if you want to see the other longer form videos you click and it opens up youtube so now you get two swings at bat where's the shorts do they have one i don't

• bullish prediction Unattributed

  back to youtube and you know how much money this is making and how big this is um this to me seems like a no-brainer for youtube to win this race because if you're a creator you're maintaining two accounts which maintain means you're maintaining two different sets of follower accounts and you know if if we have x number of people we have two hundred and ninety eight thousand subscribers here on this week in startups i think all in has over 200 as well so you know you're not you're not starting f

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  youtube shorts which felt a little bit like one of those facebook copycat things yes um is evidently gaining ground on tick tock google disclosed that youtube shorts had one and a half billion monthly active users out of its two billion plus monthly users so that's wild pretty much the size of tick tock now

• neutral fact_claim Nate O'Brien

  back when i started you can actually monetize youtube from day one so uh the first day i think i made seven cents uh from from ads because you could monetize literally like with zero subscribers

• neutral fact_claim Nate O'Brien

  there was nothing on youtube um and people don't really remember this now because it's like if you go on youtube there's so many there's so much content right but it literally did not exist if you could type in how to save money or how to invest on youtube and videos of you know elephants would pop up or something it would just be totally irrelevant stuff um so there's a really big gap in the market

• bullish assessment Howard Lindzon

  YouTube changed the world. That was the beginning of web two. And everybody thought it was stupid.

• bearish criticism Albert Wenger

  The informational freedom part is all about computation and who controls it. So, I should be able to program YouTube, not YouTube programming me, right? And fundamentally, we all carry supercomputers in our pockets. And yet, when you pull up an app on that supercomputer, let's say you pull up the YouTube app, at this point, you're reduced to basically your fingers and your brain. Like, the supercomputer is working entirely on behalf of YouTube and no longer on behalf of you.

• bullish endorsement Jason Calacanis

  the fact that youtube detected all of it stopped it and suspended every one of these accounts puts the lie to everything that zuckerberg and frankly sheryl sandberg have said even up to and including in front of congress for like a decade it can be done and they are still not doing it

• bullish fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  youtube was able to detect and reject every test submission and suspend the channel used to post them fantastic

• bullish endorsement Jason Calacanis

  it's an absolutely great story yeah uh or great move rather great product move in the direction of taking down discord

• bullish assessment Jason Calacanis

  i think you'll also be able to search by this from what i understand so you know if you wind up being at mollywood somebody could search youtube for at mollywood and then see your comments on other videos uh you know and i think that's something that's been lacking

• bullish prediction Jason Calacanis

  if this increased it with more you know ability to interact and build community good move good move

• bullish prediction David Friedberg

  if you really support your um when you support your early content creators like this and you do something nice for them like uh getting in their handles early making sure they have a good one it will increase usage that's the right that's huge

• bullish endorsement Jason Calacanis

  so if you go to youtube.com at startups that's us yeah dude so fantastic good handle good handle

• bullish prediction Jason Calacanis

  if they could turn on a persistent chat room like disco they could put they could just finish off discord with persistent chat

• bullish endorsement Jason Calacanis

  i really like this because i want to invest more in the twitter i'm sorry the youtube community and steer it towards that would be great

• bullish prediction Jason Calacanis

  your youtube feed could become feel more like a a hybrid of twitter slash tick tock slash youtube

• bullish prediction Jason Calacanis

  are they going to create a community are they going to go straight up uh and compete against twitter i think so

• bullish endorsement Molly Wood

  This to me is the best news of all, actually, because I was afraid they were going to not let you get it. If you had YouTube TV, the way that you now pay for YouTube premium, but not YouTube TV. And those are not the same service. And I was like, how far I was worried that they were going to separate these two things. And I love the fact, like, to me, the best news as a consumer is that you could have it either way. Good job, YouTube.

• neutral fact_claim Molly Wood

  It is YouTube. YouTube has closed a deal for Sunday ticket worth $2 billion per year. Yeah. It's for seven years.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  We got YouTube securing the rights to NFL Sunday ticket for two billy a year. And we're going to talk about, uh, who this is the important loss leader for in the streaming world and who might just say like, you know what? You can have it at that price.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  YouTube understood early that, yeah, we're going to share some revenue with creators, but the trade-off is going to be the billions of views that we get because people will come here to see them.

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  The, the only website that's really ever done that at scale in a meaningful way is YouTube. But Mr. Beast and, you know, the, the kid who plays video games over there, uh, I forgot his name, but people make a decent living on 55% of the ad revenue split on YouTube.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  or on YouTube. Hey, you know, I love Mark Knopfler, you know, I love Dire Straits. Can you make me an agent that makes me a playlist of only new Mark Knopfler, Dire Straits concerts that have been released, and don't play me the ones that I already have in my queue. These kind of things that they already have access to.

• bullish fact_claim Roelof Botha

  YouTube became a leader in the video space

• neutral fact_claim Roelof Botha

  shame on us in some level we didn't quite understand how interesting the company was but we kept on thinking about the company we kept on meeting with them and then we made a growth investment in the company

• neutral fact_claim Roelof Botha

  I mean this is talk about a crucible moment early in the life of our investment in YouTube literally I mean there were three founders in Chad's garage they moved into the Sequoia office right after the investment because they didn't have their first office and we faced a crucible decision early on what we

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  And it gave us what, look at the path to reaching net zero with Avno CEO, Will Kane, which I thought was much better and much shorter and tighter. And yeah, I was really impressed, but it's odd because it doesn't do it for every episode. It does it for like one in every 10 or 15 and it just happens.

• bullish prediction Unattributed

  I think YouTube shorts will surpass, uh, tick tock and, uh, Instagram reels.

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  as you say, a panda drinking coffee. So if I, you know, was a comedian, I could make this video, put my joke on top of it, right? Yes. Or, you know, they do that face overlay thing. Exactly. This basically shortens the time between publishing and creation, uh, in the same way that filters did on Instagram, right? You could put a filter on Instagram and you didn't have to open up Photoshop and take the extra 10 minutes to do that. So this is super brilliant.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  and Larry, I'm guessing it was Larry because he's got a big vision for these kind of things. He said, yeah, just lose money for five years, six years. Then if we have a billion people using YouTube, then we'll turn on advertising. It's exactly what they did, right, Ben? There must have been some and who knows when they flipped that J-curve. Tesla also had a J-curve with their cars. That was a business that would never make money, and then suddenly they tipped over into making money.

• neutral fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  There was a time, and Ben probably saw this up close and personal with YouTube, where they were in the J-curve for YouTube and Sergey

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  And the price was not cheap. It was 1.6 billion at the time. So it wasn't a steal. It wasn't a steal. Because there were multiple bidders for YouTube.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  And the sort of Damocles was over YouTube's head with the lawsuits. And there were very few companies that could have, you know, very few companies that could have sustained that long of a Viacom lawsuit.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  YouTube did not have the sort of brand presence that it has today. People thought of it as cats and skateboards. And if you're a brand advertiser, you didn't want your content on cats and skateboards and sort of the questionable content that was being shown on YouTube. But so that took a long time, but like YouTube is a juggernaut today.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  When YouTube was acquired in 2008 by Google, it was negative gross margin by a lot. By a lot. Yeah, but we lost money on every single view, right? Because most of the views were not monetizable at the time.

• bearish fact_claim Chamath Palihapitiya

  I think it's very hard to pin a section 230 claim on Reddit as easy as it is, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

• bearish criticism David Friedberg

  YouTube realized that if they showed you videos that they think that you'll click on, they'll keep you on YouTube longer and make more money from ads. So it keeps the cycle going. And so they optimize con and it turns out that the content that you need to optimize for, to get people to keep clicking is content that is somewhat activating to the amygdala on your brain. It's like stuff that makes you angry or makes you super pleasured and not just boring, ordinary stuff. And so this sort of conten

• neutral assessment Daniel Ek

  the way for us to compete with that is just making our service better and better.

• bearish fact_claim Daniel Ek

  one of the largest things that people do is, um, stream repping. You know, just, if you look in the, um, app stores, both the Apple and, and, um, Google, uh, app stores, you see in the top 10 apps, um, almost exclusively always, there's some sort of stream ripper where you can download the stuff off of YouTube or SoundCloud or any of those platforms and put it in your local library.

• neutral fact_claim Daniel Ek

  what we saw very clearly is like the people who were listening to Taylor Swift, you could see an immediate spike, you know, the next day from when we removed her catalog to, uh, YouTube streams. It was almost a one-to-one correlation because kids are smart.

• neutral assessment Daniel Ek

  No, it's because they want to get promoted. Uh, so they view it more as promotion than, um, anything else.

• neutral fact_claim Molly Wood

  Susan Wojcicki never gets called to Congress. I mean, it just is fascinating.

• neutral fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  I do think that there is something that Larry and Sergey did very specifically. They fired themselves. This was a strategic, I know this, because I know them, they did something very strategic. They put themselves as chairman, you know, board members, they don't go to the office. And they're like, I can't get dragged to Washington or in front of you know, whoever in parliament and whatever European country EU because I don't work there. I am a shareholder. If you drag me up there, I'm going to s

• mixed assessment Molly Wood

  YouTube for so long has escaped all of this scrutiny, right? And YouTube has been employing an algorithm for engagement that has encouraged really dangerous stunts for years. They've had advertiser boycotts over, you know, advertisers who don't want to be put next to terrorist content. And, and somehow, YouTube has managed to sort of like, walk this line where they take some stuff down. They leave a lot of stuff up. Yeah. They demonetize. They demonetize. I mean, honestly, I think, you know, in

• neutral assessment Deirdre Bosa

  I also kind of think that YouTube, Google gets a free pass, how much of that has to do with what we talked about at the very beginning of this conversation. Senator Pichai is the most calm, collected CEO. You can say boring, or I'll say it. They go to Congress. Everyone wants to jump on Jack Dorsey, Bezos, even Tim Cook. And, you know, you feel kind of bad, you know, taking that same tone with Senator Pichai, because he's such an intellectual, such a technologist that I just, do you think that's

• bearish criticism Jason Calacanis

  you really, you really got to get this under control. So I'm like, Oh, am I for censorship? Yeah, because I'm like, you're really more like a broadcast like a network discovery, you know, or CNBC wouldn't show that stuff or they would really contextualize it.

• neutral fact_claim Deirdre Bosa

  We saw that with YouTube, people kind of freaked out last quarter because growth was slower.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  YouTube is full of very talented people that, you know, can produce like almost the exact same quality, uh, of, you know, copyrighted music.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  And so you may have seen all in two weeks ago, we put the Balenciaga AI video that somebody made at the end of the show. And then it turned on ads on the show. So then we had a choice, either turn the show off, re-upload it, or just deal with the fact that somebody else is going to make, you know, $5,000 off that episode, which I think we just decided the ladder.

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  Google bought YouTube at a time when YouTube had a multi-billion dollar, you know, lawsuit with Viacom and YouTube was going to be shut down for all the copyright violations going on there. And they were able to navigate that. So Google is incredibly savvy on navigating fair use.

• bullish fact_claim Chamath Palihapitiya

  and then what did google do that youtube would have never been able to do to sax's point they built an engine that could automatically recognize copyright content and pull it down before it was made publicly available

• bullish assessment David Sacks

  google had google videos but they just couldn't come close to catching youtube because the flywheel of creators wanting to be where all the viewers were and viewers wanting to be where the most content was it was just impossible to catch

• bullish assessment David Sacks

  what google in effect got when they acquired youtube was a flywheel i mean it was a brand and it was a network effect and that yeah the network effect was massive it was off to the races

• bullish fact_claim Chamath Palihapitiya

  they made billions and billions of dollars of investments into that business for years before it started to make money

• bullish assessment Chamath Palihapitiya

  i think youtube's probably worth what 300 400 500 billion dollars at this point

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  like uh what's it called rumbler as an alternative to youtube

• bearish fact_claim Unattributed

  the algorithm is making editorial decisions

• bearish fact_claim Unattributed

  no no you go to twitter you go to youtube you go to tick tock for you is there you can't turn it off

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  they've already been doing that they've been outsourcing content moderation to these bpos these business process organizations in the philippines and so on and frankly where english may be a second language and that is part of the reason why we have such a mess around content moderation they're trying to implement content guidelines and it's impossible

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  the nuance here that could be very valuable for all these big tech companies is to say listen you can post content whoever follows you will get that in a real-time feed that responsibility is yours and we have a body of law that covers that but if you want me to promote it in my algorithm there may be some delay in how it's amplified algorithmically and there's going to be some incremental costs that i bear because i have to review that content and i'm going to take it out of your ad share or ot

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  i suspect that youtube goes to great lengths to prevent that type of violent or terrorist content from getting to the top of the feed

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  i find it completely implausible in fact ludicrous that youtube made an editorial decision to put a piece of terrorist content at the top of the field

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  they could do that it would cut down their margins it would make them less profitable but they could do that they could have a clearinghouse mechanism for all this content that gets included in a recommendation algorithm they don't for efficiency and for monetization and for virality and for content velocity i think that's the big thing that it changes it would just force these folks to moderate everything

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  so now where does youtube fit is it paper with their algorithm i would argue it's more like the newsstand and if it's a bomb recipe and youtube's you know doing the algorithm

• bullish fact_claim MrBeast

  YouTube is the only platform right now where you can upload a video in different languages. So if someone clicks my video in Mexico, I'll speak Spanish. Whereas if you click it in America, I'll speak English. ... So YouTube is the only place right now where you can actually have a global audience.

• bullish assessment MrBeast

  Well, the problem is like, like I said at the start, you know, YouTube's where all the viewers are. So it's like, sure you can get a little bit of money, but ultimately the real game is if you can get a billion views a month for 10 years, you know, whatever, the amount of brands we could build is, you know, insane.

• bullish endorsement MrBeast

  I mean, I kind of like it because then no one can say there's favoritism or they're helping us in any way.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  because we have the model where we're making money outside of YouTube so I can spend more

• bearish criticism MrBeast

  the big thing is like obviously YouTube, you know, at the moment, you don't make that much from ad revenue. So to do these big multimillion dollar videos, it's just not really possible, which is why doing things like festivals and other products to generate revenue on the back end, is why we're able to do that and other people aren't. Because it's like, you know, if you get even if you get 100 million views on a video, the RPM is $5. It's only 500 grand. You know what I mean? So it's not that cr

• bullish assessment MrBeast

  And it's nice because the same people who I would take pictures with in Walmart, when they see our product there, they're like, oh, it's the guy from YouTube and they'll buy it.

• bullish assessment MrBeast

  The beauty is there's, well, YouTube, that's my main platform. You know, obviously if you buy an Android phone, YouTube's pre-installed, and Alphabet owns it. So when you search things on Google, it takes you to YouTube a lot of times. So YouTube is just massive. I mean, billions of people use it on a monthly basis. And so being big on YouTube, you know, we get 100 million views on a video in the first seven days, which, you know, before the last couple of years, that's never been possible in hi

• bullish prediction Unattributed

  YouTube and Waymo, those would be like a $400 billion company, a $50 billion company. And those are right in the zeitgeist of the future and what advertisers want. So I think offering those two up would unlock massive shareholder value.

• neutral fact_claim David Sacks

  The big categories would be search, advertising and YouTube.

• bullish assessment David Friedberg

  I do think that there's a lot of value unlock in YouTube. So if Google were to just generally spin out YouTube, that is probably a business that on its own would attract an investor base that might otherwise not want to get into the conglomerate. ... YouTube certainly seems like an unlock.

• neutral fact_claim David Friedberg

  YouTube, 34 billion, growing 15%. A little volatile because it's advertising that doesn't include premium YouTube TV and that stuff. But oh my Lord, YouTube is up to 2.7 billion monthly active users. World population is 8.2. So quite significant. Netflix has 38 billion in revenue. They're worth almost 300 billion. So that's an interesting corollary.

• bearish criticism Megyn Kelly

  if you go on YouTube and you Google anorexia or bulimia, they won't show you the videos. But if you Google top surgery, which is the super sweet way of saying a double mastectomy, usually for 15 or 14-year-old girls, you can see all you want all day long.

• bullish fact_claim Megyn Kelly

  But let's just look at YouTube. So all those resources go into their YouTube feed as well. And it's got every show on CNN, every single talent. And our one show with my six producers crushed the, well, came close to crushing them all, and did crush CBS and NBC, which was a particularly nice.

• bearish prediction David Friedberg

  They were under a serious lawsuit. I think they would have shut down.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  both YouTube and GCP required many, many, many, many billions of dollars of investment over many years. Same with Waymo, by the way, at this point. That took a long time and a lot of capital to get the payback on. If those were standalone businesses and they didn't have the profits being derived from search and ads over many years, they would not have been able to build those incredible businesses.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  clearly YouTube would be one of the great companies right now. If you take the perspective of, if you own stock in any of these companies, the sum of the parts analysis would tell you that the breakup value is greater than the way that these companies get discounted. You can look at the multiples that they trade at, and you can see that. So if you're a shareholder of the company, you actually silently probably want them broken up because you'll get individual shares that are each will be worth m

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  YouTube had a tremendous quarter ad revenue 8.9 billion. Chamath that's up 12%. But Sundar said something interesting. He said YouTube surpassed 50 billion in total revenue over the past year. And so if you do a little Bote math, that's the back of the envelope math for those of you at home. We haven't heard that acronym. Google doesn't report YouTube's non ad revenue, but we know YouTube had 35 billion in ad revenue over the last year. That means they're doing about 15 billion in premium paid p

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  YouTube doesn't spend on content, YouTube does a revenue share. They actually technically don't know what's going to get uploaded today, and it could be the biggest video of the day.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  YouTube being at the top of the connected TV streaming apps, like you'd probably choose YouTube if you're just going pure distribution.

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  I think it's the best 20 bucks I spend on it.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  YouTube Premium, taking the ads out, is that 110? 125 million subscribers. Is that 125 now? Yeah. I knew they broke in 100.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  I think probably that if you've seen the Nielsen ratings of connected TV usage, YouTube's at the top at 11%. Right. It's the most used streaming app on connected TVs. Netflix is at 8.5%.

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  So we think about platforms in the context of like permission and interruption. So YouTube is an interruptive platform. You have to stop someone in their tracks with a thumbnail to get them to click in, right? But Spotify, for example, is a permission-based platform.

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  Like some of our videos that are still picking up viewership today were made four years ago. So the best way to do it is to build a catalog that accrues viewership over time. So you're mainly looking at subject matters with high total addressable markets on YouTube, right? Like specific on YouTube.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  I wouldn't say that timely, because I think YouTube operates as a catalog, right?

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  I would say probably the biggest creators, most successful creators, largely have like a 70% viewership base that's not subscribed to them. Really? Yeah. Yeah, I would say that's pretty common amongst our friend group and amongst the people that we work with. And I think a lot of that has to do with the algorithm shift towards viewer satisfaction. And YouTube is a recommendations algorithm. So first, when we first started making YouTube videos, if you could make a great thumbnail, people would c

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  Specifically, YouTube now, like when you buy a new TV, you just, I when I moved to the ranch, you got a new TV, and it's got YouTube on the remote. And you just think about that as a concept. And then I watch my daughter's behaviors, and they are watching YouTube on the giant television, not on their iPads. It's really a major difference.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  I don't think you can underscore the importance of the YouTube app on TVs. Just the fact that there was now a free option, and you have people who are in a setting where they want to actually sit and consume something for a longer period of time. So as creators started putting out longer videos, they started serving more ads, making more money, investing back in their channels, in their shows, and now they can actually produce things consistently. They can make things better. They can elevate it

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  I think YouTube search is the place to go all in. Right now, when you do a YouTube search, it just gives you 10 links, right? Just give you that rolling bang. You should be able to ask a question to YouTube and you should be able to ask questions to your calendar. You should be able to say, who have I met with over the last 10 years who I'm no longer in touch with? And what are they up to? And it should do a Gemini search inside of Google Calendar. It's very light right now. And then if you did

• bullish endorsement Cleo Abram

  And that's what makes making something yourself on YouTube so special. You're creating something asking, are there millions of people out there like me? And the answer turns out to be yes.

• neutral fact_claim Cleo Abram

  most YouTubers have ad-funded businesses.

• bullish fact_claim Cleo Abram

  streamers... can look at this incredible new wealth of creativity and IP and say, oh my God, who do we want to work with to give, you know, upfront capital to make something that's even bigger. And so, now they're working with YouTubers.

• bullish assessment Cleo Abram

  we're in the middle of this big moment of change in media and how media gets made. And I don't think most people know that it's really happening. They know that YouTube shows can get big, but they don't really understand the shift that we're in.

• bullish fact_claim Cleo Abram

  YouTube has become, in the last 18 months, I think, the most watched streaming platform on televisions.

• bullish assessment Cleo Abram

  YouTube made that bet that if you allow anyone to create their best creative work, the widest audience will watch.

• bullish fact_claim David Friedberg

  YouTube's the number one media company in the world.

• bearish criticism David Sacks

  going the wrong way, and it felt like every week there's some new category of thought and expression that you couldn't say, and they were banning new things.

• bearish criticism Tony

  the interesting thing is that you can say certain words on YouTube, but you can't say, they have them ranked, and the rules change all the time. And you don't find out that the rules at YouTube have changed until your producer goes, they just demonetized the episode. We got a couple strikes. And it's been out for an hour and a half, which is when everybody's going to see the episode, or the age restriction is a killer, because almost... Yeah, we got hit