Google Cloud misses revenue estimates – and it's your fault, wanting smaller bills Google Cloud remains profitable, but the search and ads giant's rent-a-server side-hustle has struggled as customers seek to reduce costs. Parent company Alphabet detailed [PDF] its financial performance for the quarter ending September 30, 2023, on Tuesday. It revealed revenue of $76.7 billion – an 11 percent year on year …
I hope that, in some small way, my use of things like uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger help contribute to those ad slinging shortfalls.
That said... I was unaware that Youtube had a minimum length for videos. I mean, why would they need to create a whole new sub-service for "short" videos unless there was some minimum length on youtube proper? You know, preventing people from simply uploading short videos if that's what they wanted to do and forcing them to upload videos at least some minimum duration long. TIL.
My guess is that they've built something to only show you short videos in a never-ending avalanche, because as far as I can tell, that's what TikTok is and people seem to like it. Also as far as I can tell, each of the videos concerned is just short enough that they can't actually do anything useful in it, no matter how hard they might try to compress it. I don't think it's just so that you can upload a short video, but to take the ones they have and inundate users with them because evidently that helps.
why would they need to create a whole new sub-service for "short" videos
There is no minimum length on YouTube videos. The Shorts service is more about giving users a different way to watch videos (short video repeats automatically until you swipe to the next one). I understand that video creators can choose whether their video should show up on Shorts, but only if the video is less than a minute long. As to why they've created a "whole new sub-service" to watch videos in a slightly different way, that's because they've noticed a lot of users thought it was more enjoyable to watch videos in that way. From the numbers, it seems they were right.
Alphabet isn't getting al the soup it wants because people are <gasp> actually trying to lower costs !
Look at that poor Pichai. He tried a measure of goodwill and now his customers are stabbing him in the back !
He might even have to reduce his quartely bonus by a million or two.
Have people no heart ?
In truth, I think most of them come from the friend who's currently couch-surfing at my place.
She'll basically sit on the couch and doom-flick between Tiktok videos and their ilk for hours at a time; I'd guess the average watch-time is somewhere around 5 seconds.
Does sometimes make me think that the people who cry out about how modern technology rots the brain may actually have a point...
Wanting to save costs? Well of course, that's one of the stated claims that cloud can do. Performs better and costs less.
The hidden line is if, of course, your application and server model permits dynamic scaling with no user interaction, and you can setup your applications with no users logging into systems. But Gartner doesn't state so, so it's ignored. Lift and shift, fucko.
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