There are three possible outcomes:
YouTube will become only curated content.
They will give up and it will become status quo again.
Google will close down the platform.
The thing I find curious is that no one has been able create a proper competitor besides maybe Twitch. Twitch suffers from the same problems as Youtube, though.
Either option 2 or 3, or 1 leading to 3 as traffic drops.
There was proper competition, but it could not monetize itself properly. https://medium.com/vidme/goodbye-for-now-120b40becafa
Bootstrapping a video platform is hard. Creators wonāt come unless thereās viewers and viewers arenāt interested unless thereās creators. Margins are thin too, so thereās not a whole lot of investor interest either.
I donāt envy them on the work they need to doā¦ but I do think the more effort and attention they put on this, the better.
Similarly to Youtube policy reviewers (horrible name, Iām imagining a 1984-like scene with a huge building with an open floor plan and a ton of desks akin to Ministry of Truth), Google has had humans assessing ad quality and landing page quality in ads to try to determine whether itās legally safe to show an ad to a user from a particular country, or how you may or may not want to rank this page in the search results (or if you want to show it at all) ā¦ Oh the stories Iāve heard. For example, if I remember correctly, in Germany thereās a legal precedent where an angle of a penis matters in determining whether the content is sexual in nature, or just medical; applying that particular rule in Netherlands or any of the scandinavian countries would apparently be unfair (thus exposing the company to legal risk there, ā¦ or legal risk in Germany if you donāt apply it, but IANAL, soo take it with a grain of salt). Then thereās sports betting, apparently perfectly fine in the UK, you can see bookies sponsoring soccer teams, it is outlawed in the US, except Nevada. What if the website is one jurisdiction, user in another, who knows where the server is with all the traffic balancingā¦ and which server is it with microservices, the one where connection is terminated and http turned into rpc, one that determines which ad to serve or not serve, one that does the search for an add, or one that is the central repository of this ad ācreativeā / contentā¦ PITA to figure out.
On top of the legal dictated policy, thereās policies stemming from company brand/image where Google can (in some casesā¦ debatable) exercise their discretionary rights, e.g. something that is in bad taste according to the company culture, maybe shouldnāt be served from the servers of the company. Whatās discretionary, whatās not and what applies where is another thing.
And then on top of that, you have these reviewers personal backgrounds and biases and judgements and which side of the bed they got up on, youāre trying to trade off reviewing as many things as possible as quickly as possible with review quality (e.g. how many different people review any single thing, what if they disagree?).
And then thereās people writing āalgorithmsā (more like code that burns cycles on neural networks)" that either assist reviews or take them over entirely, that are basically secret sauce, because they allow some number of human reviewers to scale to being able to do much much more work that normally (providing competitive advantage), and worse than that, if theyāre made public would allow for bad actors to āgame themā, in a hard to notice or hard to recover from way. Those āalgorithmsā are by definition imperfect, but the idea is theyāre probably worth running.
Then thereās a bunch of people whose job is to figure out when someone from the russian āinternet research agencyā or the likes tries to exploit things and do fake news like stuff, and they try to be ahead of them, shows up with fake internet personas and submits net neutrality comments or retweets a whole bunch of trump tweets.
As I said, I donāt envy those youtube reviewers, making a platform where anyone can do anything would not be a good thing IMHO, thereās lots that goes into making things work the way everyone thinks things should work for them, and it gets real complicated real fast.
I agree with that. But, if Google moves to curated content a gap will open.
Remember YouTube was a dating site. Twitch is starting to mutate from gaming to a general purpose platform. My guess the next big competitor may originate from from the adult video industry.
End of the day YouTube can do what they want. Itās there platform. I wouldnāt worry about the reviewers though, the NGOs Google hired all have their own agendas (just look them up) and I imagine are quite happy policing YouTube against their own policies.
I mean is anyone actually surprised.
Question is should they be able to. Given their unique position, power and status.