They bought an existing service, made few improvements to it, made it worse in some ways, continue to ignore its major problems, and keep it artificially limited on their competitors' platforms (like not supporting the native Picture-in-Picture feature on iPad for years.)
Worst of all, because they are So Big, people are preemptively disheartened from even imagining a competitor.
Before the acquisition Youtube were getting their ass kicked about all the copyright violation on the site, they were losing money, they had no ad revenue sharing with video creators, they only supported low-resolution video, and only in an Adobe Flash player.
All of which changed after the acquisition.
I would agree, of course, that there's plenty wrong with Youtube these days, and the pace of innovation has dropped a lot.
To be fair with this one, this was the only reasonable way to do video in a browser for a stupidly long time.
This is the one point that makes YouTube so difficult to shake. The money is attractive to creators and YouTube offers the most money with the largest audience. YouTube themselves actually gets 45% of the revenue, while the creator gets 55%.
It’s actually really cheap if you’re thinking about it.
Huh? AFAIK the Youtube Google bought wasn't profitable and it had much fewer viewers and content creators. It even lacked transcode options! Other than the basic functionality it provided (you could upload clips for free, you could watch other people's clips for free) it isn't comparable to today's Youtube.
It's perfectly reasonable to hypothesize that it would have been as good or better feature wise.
Also, saying it didn't have a big userbase? Compared to what? It was easily as much of a giant relative to the competition then, as currently youtube is to its competition.
Google has introduced many great features that would not be possible without google or google ai. Muting songs but not background sounds is a cool new feature. Identifying and categorizing videos and presenting similiar videos is better than anywhere else.
For years youtube couldn't make money. Without google figuring this piece out a site like this would still be too expensive.
"Staying in business" was an improvement that literally would not have happened without Google (or at least Google, Apple, Amazon or Microsoft). The site was literally doing bankrupt, and down in flames. It needed Google to sustain the losses, and someone with that much of a warchest and legal power to muscle into collective agreements with enough music collecting societies to survive.
They don't really pay for bandwidth in the way you are thinking about it.
