I remember thinking Google paid an absurd and ridiculous sum of money when they acquired YouTube. I couldn’t have been more wrong, what an incredible acquisition.
Just like with FB’s purchase of Instagram. I remember people making fun of Zuckerberg for paying $1B for a “filter app than can be made in few hours”.
I think the magic wasn’t in those apps or websites but the traction they got and how that was preserved. Both FB and Google were very careful to preserve the origins when evolving.
I remember Google videos, it was very bad. If this wasn’t Google but Microsoft, they may have tried to integrate Youtube into their Video platform and destroy everything.
Yeah, he was buying market share. Google was buying advertising potential and market share. The largest video streaming platform on the planet, still not a silly buy.
At the time YouTube was acquired their infrastructure costs were quite high. Not as crazy as today's AI companies, but in the same way a lot of people were questioning if they could ever make money because of it.
Ah I see, I think I was still in my teens when that purchase happened, so I had no idea about the concerns or anything. I just was shocked at the amount of money because it's a lot of money.
The Youtube acquisition and growth strategy was interesting (I left another comment about this). IG was also quite interesting.
Many here will be familiar with how the founders of these tech companies basically keep control over their companies while holding minority stakes through different classes of shares. Zuckerberg was the only one to hold these shares I believe and could basically authorize the IG purchase by himself. And that's what he did. He told the board after the fact. At least that's the story I read.
IG was growing fast but it blossomed under FB's stewardship in a way that I'm not sure it would've had it stayed independent or someone else had bought it. For many years, IG was allowed to operate semi-autonomously within FB (kinda similar to Youtube under Google actually). They continue to have their own tech stack, which has caused its fair share of problems, and essentially operated seprately from a product perspective.
But scaling requires a whole bunch of infrastructure that isn't all technical. Things like site safety, taking down problematic content, creating an ads ecosystem and so on. FB had a lot of expertise and existing infrastructure for all of this because of, well, Facebook. And whatever fauts FB has, this is something they did very well.
I totally think Google would've screwed it up, for example.
I guess my point is that they didn't exactly buy a $100B+ business for $1B. They turned it into a $100B+ business. Just like Youtube.
That being said, I think IG has actually faltered from a product perspective over the last 5+ years. Reels (like Youtube Shorts) are a kneejerk reaction to Tiktok, who is eating both of them alive in short-form video. And Tiktok's recommendation algorithms are a step above of anything I've seen on FB, IG or Youtube.
I was never a big IG user but from what I hear from people who are or were and what I read online, it feels like IG has kinda lost its way and nobody really knows what it's for anymore. It's certainly not for sharing among your friends (which is how FB started too). Photo-sharing seems to be falling away to video. So who exactly is it for?
> Tiktok's recommendation algorithms are a step above of anything I've seen on FB, IG or Youtube.
That's because their main UI isn't anything like Tik Tok. You start out with a normal feed on IG, on YouTube you might see recommended videos, but its not BAM HERES SHORT FORM. Tik Tok was by design this UI and recommendation scheme. I think its a UX issue not an algorithm issue necessarily. If I open YouTube shorts I get a lot of the content I keep going back on YouTube to watch, on IG probably not since I dont use FB or IG much if at all. If these UIs were more prominent, I could see them matching or competing with Tik Tok on these fronts.
What's funny to me is Tik Tok users quitting Tik Tok because they think the US has poisoned it, and then running to YouTube or reddit. Look on r/tiktok sometime, I have been checking on it anytime Tik Tok has 'drama' and it never disappoints.
I agree that the UX on Tiktok is cleaner and, like you say, in part part that's due to it being only short-form. It's worth noting that "short form" here means up to ~10 minutes long at this point, includes live videos and also includes photo galleries.
But it's more than that.
When I started using Tiktok, Charli D'Amelio was the biggest creator I believe and not once did I ever see one of her videos. I'm just not in that demographic. I've had repeated experiences on Tiktok where I'd see a new creator and see they have like 17M followers and I'd think "how have I never heard of them before?"
The way I describe this is that Tiktok's content is effectively segmented and isn't "global". By "global" I mean if someone is a top creator on IG or FB or Twitter, you'll see them. The platform will push them out to you and Tiktok is just more sophisticated than that.
The second big difference is the responsiveness. It takes other platforms longer to learn. Maybe they've gotten better now but, from what I know, historically other platforms had daily jobs that updated user recommendation preferences based on your activity. So if I started watching a lot of gaming videos, this wouldn't be reflected in my feed until the next day. Tiktok I think was the first to have a truly real-time updating feed.
Now this isn't a straight real-time vs overnight situation. It is/was more hybrid than that. So in FB's case, recommendations were more real-time but updating your preferences wasn't.
Insta was tapping out of how much content (and therefore ads) they could show a user. They could either find new content to show or add more ads per unit of content. There are only so many friends, who only take so many photos. Social media stopped being “social” because it just wasn’t as good of a business as generic media. There are endless influencers and videos is way more engaging. Influencer content is semi-professional content and is way better made and way more engaging than your family who posts only at big events. Meta is very data driven, and they understand exactly how reels is increasing duration of app sessions - which means more ads.
YouTube is close to losing that preservation. It's so slow and clunky to load in the desktop browser that I'm finding myself using it a lot less. It's absurd how heavy it is now.
UX is getting worse too, e.g. the save to list dialog closing after adding to a single list instead of allowing multiple to be selected. It wouldn't be so bad if it didn't take forever to open.
A few things I can’t stand about Youtube’s desktop website:
1) Spacebar sometimes skips to the next video when playing a playlist. Just why?
2) You never know if the small buttons like play next on the thumbnails will work or just play that video right away.
2) when on the homepage, you open a few videos in new tabs and close the homepage only to find out that you just open bunch of “this video contains paid promotion” disclaimer pages. Re-open the homepage to actually open the videos and they are all gone, the page shows a grid of different videos.
so yes, I agree that the web interface went downhill.
I am using it less because I can't find any videos as the search is completely broken (no, I won't enable history tracking). Many days when I am in the mood to watch videos, I just give up. It doesn't help now that most searches return AI-generated video (that has millions of views). Who watches these things?
glad it’s not just me. we used to have multi-playlist saves with a modal that showed more than three pixels of your library. now it’s slow, cramped, and forces you to hit SAVE over and over even though the backend supports it. feels like a regression dressed up as bad UX.
For a lot of the early years, it lost a lot of money. Providing the bandwidth, getting distribution closer to the ISPs etc was a major investment. Lots of dark fiber.
A bit like Google Maps though, a great visionary early investment that they then poured a lot of $ into to make them what they are today. No one else was just providing free satellite imagery for the entire world back then, not even Google Maps.
The investments to support these two products at least, have been really important in helping Google maintain its hold in other places too.
Lots of people still whinge about youtube, but standing up a solid competitor would take too many $ for anyone but other big tech now.
Which certainly raises the question: are they in fact making money overall on youtube? Considering not just the initial acquisition cost, but also the further investment they put in over the years. I'm not sure how one would find out, but it isn't the slam dunk obvious case that the OP was implying.
> are they in fact making money overall on youtube?
if they weren't, won't it make sense to drop it? So by empirical observation of the outcome, it seems like youtube produces enough value to google that it is worth the investment!
Now if you ask whether youtube is financially net-positive; ala, if youtube were to be spun off as an individual/separate entity without being owned by google, then that's another question altogether. I have doubts it is financially net-positive without the leverage that google provides in utilizing youtube's assets.
Post-acquisition, Google employees made a number of smart moves with good execution, including a viable comp model for the creators and music rights deals. Several moves I consider bad as well, but the good moves outweigh them.
Looking back, I’m still pretty amazed they got so much of it right. Which is to say, a good chunk of the value wasn’t in the value of YouTube itself but in what Google brought to the table _or_ a synergy between the two.
I’m not sure how true it is but I remember reading the story where Google saw YouTube as the better choice because those guys are down the road, against their other competitors that they were trying to buy.
The story of this is actually pretty interesting. Everyone had been tryign to do video-on-demand and failing, basically. Including Google. Google had a product called Google Video that failed pretty spectacularly.
Youtube came along and was basically spending money like there was no tomorrow. Well, for the time. It's nothing compared to the current crop of AI companies. So with Youtube, everybody was terrified of the bandwidth costs, with good reason. The cost to build a sufficient network was exorbitant using off-the-shelf hardware.
Google runs their own networking hardware and servers at the efficiency level at the time that was unprecedented. They measure things in a unit called PUE (power unit effectiveness). That's basically how many Watts each Watt of computing power cost. Things like cooling would eat that up. Typical data centers at the time were at like 1.5-2. Google's own data centers were more like 1.1. Google was actually lying and saying it was 1.2 and people didn't believe it was that low. The best Google data centers are I believe more like 1.05-1.08 now. Passing cooling and that sort of thing contributes to this.
So Google of anyone had the cost controls on computing power and and networking like nobody else. And Youtube was burning VC cash. That's why they got it so "cheap".
This still created huge problems for Google and as Youtube continued to grow it was heavily impacting national ISPs, peering connections and the like. When Youtube was acquired they came up with a bandaid solution (called Bandaid) where they bought commercial server racks from Dell and elsewhere and loaded their own software on them. They would give them to big ISPs. The software would locally cache the most popular Youtube videos to cut on the ISP's bandwidth costs and the latency. I believe that this temporary solution became permanent and continues to this day.
Nobody could monetize Youtube like Google either as in nobody else has a remotely comparable ad infrastructure and ecosystem.
And lastly, nobody could encode video like Google could. Nobody else had access to that much computing power and could use it as efficiently. That was a huge deal because the encoding requirements are massive.
So yes, it was an amazing acquisition but I think if anyone else at the time bought it, they would've failed.
Not sure if WhatsApp paid off, though. There are reports of up to $1 billion in annual revenue with the Business API, so this is far less than what they paid. I think Meta's strategy was to create a Western version of WeChat, which has a very high ARPU, but for some reason, they never invested in it properly... They added Stories, a "Venmo" feature, and then gave up.
I think that's an example of the opposite, the number was huge but how much revenue is being driven by WhatsApp? I think that would be a hard one to put a number on. I'm sure it's important for Meta overall, but it's not directly driving ad or subscription revenue.
Whatsapp claims to be E2E encryption, but it can still submit anonymous("") metadata("") At least they can identify you and your contacts by real phone number, real name and nicknames, and more often than not real pictures; the information can be crosschecked across all your contacts who in good faith provide good information.
There are also bussiness accounts which are really important depending on the location.
It is very hard to put a price to that, but its value is undisputable.
This is exactly my point. I'm sure there's lots of intelligence that Meta can attribute value to, in a complex attribution process, but I doubt that it's as simple as a revenue stream or P&L.
That's the weird thing about WhatsApp though.. back when they bought WhatsApp it was still a paid service and a lot of people actually paid for it and it was on its way to get to a billion active users.
After that acquisition, they made it free for all and started chasing the $$$ with WhatsApp for business. And ads. No idea which is more profitable anymore. I think they'd still be able to monetize it more with WhatsApp payments and those ads in status updates. I'd definitely like to know what the numbers are looking like these days..
> it was still a paid service and a lot of people actually paid for it
It was, but it was very cheap (UK pricing was £1 a year), and I believe had lots of free users anyway. My guess is that the revenue wasn't worth pursuing.
> the number was huge but how much revenue is being driven by WhatsApp?
Meta isn't a charity. If they aren't making money off WhatsApp outright, the users are the value and they're making money off them some other way, encryption be damned.
Meta gets to spy on the communication habits and networks of half of the planet through Whatsapp. Since Meta is essentially a mass surveillance company, the acquisition makes a lot of sense.
I’ve been working on https://og.plus, a service that creates unique Open Graph images per page on a website.
It does this by taking a screenshot of the page, but before it does that, you can modify what’s displayed in the screenshot with CSS, tailwind classes, meta tags, or HTML templates.
If you connect your website to it, the only thing you need to deploy to your web app are a few meta tags. The OG+ servers do the heavy lifting of processing the meta tags to setup the page, take a screenshot of it, and serve it up to the consumer.
The other cool thing it does is generate a different Open Graph images per social network so they all get an image for the exact size they works best in their previews. The CSS or HTML templates are aware of this too so you can display different content to specific social networks.
The pendulum is in full swing. Soon it will be ban worthy offense to suggest there are more than two genders.
Though I am morbidly enjoying the irony of seeing those on the left suddenly discover an interest in free speech, and those on the right discover their love for campaigning to get people deplatformed.
I'm beginning to put together that party-lines are strictly about gaining and holding power at all costs. Irony disappears through that lens and the way people act makes much more sense.
I think there's a stark difference between government control of free speech and authoritarianism (Right wing) and activists using social clout or 'mob justice' to deplatform people (Left wing). Both aren't good, but there's a huge difference.
All of which are private institutions and therefore are valid expressions of free speech in and of themselves, even if you found it corrosive.
The idea the government needs to step in to tell HR departments what mixture of ideas they’re allowed to hire and reward is ridiculous. That is an actual affront to free speech.
If you don’t like woketard social dynamics, make your own HR department that lacks them, duh.
I shot the Phlex on Rails video course outside last summer with a glossy screen and barely notice reflections or glare, mainly because I setup shop under the shade of large oak trees. The bigger issue with direct sunlight is the glare off the chassis and heat, even when it’s 75F/24C outside.
Many people believe running fibre between buildings, even in ducts, is safer than running copper because you get opto-isolation from lightning.
The second thing is that domestic buildings usually do not come with a consistent ground plane. I worked in a 1960s build purpose made for mainframes and we had ~48v floating between racks at either end of the building and had to do a shitload of work to reground the building, in the 90s (-we were decommissioning an IBM 3033 and deploying a secondhand cray1) the point being somehow, God knows how, prior rs232 serial wiring didn't care and the ground plane for the mainframe was fine at the time. Pre Ethernet this stuff maybe just passed code.
I suspect people who build their own home to some spec acquire these theories. Data comms? Not much reason tbh unless you're pushing a lot more data than normal.
> The second thing is that domestic buildings usually do not come with a consistent ground plane.
Ordinary unshielded copper Ethernet doesn’t care: it’s transformer-isolated at both ends. Shielded cable may object to carrying any substantial amount of current through the shield.
Anyway, there are a handful of good reasons to use fiber:
- Length. Copper is specced for 100m. Panduit will sell fancy copper cable that they pinky-swear works for Ethernet at 150m. Single mode fiber will work at silly long distances.
- High bandwidth. Copper will do 10Gbps. High speed specs exist, but there is approximately zero commercial availability of anything beyond 10G using copper at any appreciable distance. Fiber has no such problems.
IMO if you are running fiber anywhere that makes it awkward to replace (i.e. not just within a single room), use single mode. Multimode fiber has gone through ~5 revisions over the last few decades, and the earlier ones have very unimpressive bandwidth capabilities at any reasonable distance. Even the latest version, where truly heroic engineering has gone into reducing modal dispersion, relies on fancy multistrand cables for the faster Ethernet speeds. Single-mode fiber, meanwhile, continues to work very well and supports truly huge bandwidth at rather long distances, and even decades-old fiber supports the latest standards. And the transceivers for single-mode fiber are no longer much more expensive than multimode transceivers.
Late edit: one exception is A/V. Sometimes you want fiber for applications other than networking. There are A/V applications for fiber, for example. If you need this, use what the thing you’re using the fiber for requires, and consider putting it in conduit. If your application calls for MMF, consider using the highest grade you can get at a reasonable price, which is probably OM4.
Also, preterminated fiber is a thing. While it’s not that hard to terminate MMF, it’s still easier and more reliable to buy preterminated fiber. SMF terminations are apparently much more sensitive to being done perfectly, and buying preterminated fiber is wise. (I’ve never personally terminated any fiber, but I have installed and connected fiber, and it’s delightful to just plug it in.)
It's one of those "just because" moments. The idea was to future proof my home infra for a 25G NAS connection. Most ethernet connections tap out at 10G. While theoretically speaking Cat 8 cables can do 40G, hardware support for full 40G Cat 8 NICs is rare. Fibre is very very flexible with its potential bandwidth and SFP28 transceivers are relatively affordable (if you don't do what I did by using SMF. Home networks should only use MMF if the property isn't a mansion.)
I still prefer SMF over MMF. It also allows me to "move" where the city fiber comes in and patch it to another location without any active hardware. So I can for example move my router into another room.
I'd say the opposite - any fibre in a wall should probably be single-mode fibre (SMF), simply for future proofing. Single mode optics aren't much more expensive and single mode fibre hasn't changed nearly as many times as multi-mode. You can run 25G over the same SMF that once ran 1G - not so with MMF.
10GbE rj45 (normal ethernet jack) spf modules tend to burn power and get extremely hot, like to the point of burning you if you touch it - the manual for my switch said to leave adjacent ports unoccupied if using one of those. The fiber ones run cool to the touch.
Also, not needing to rerun any cabling if we want to bump up speeds in the future, you just change the laser module on either end. These should be good to >100x current speeds. Not the case with copper.
The real problem here is that 10GBASE-T is ancient. The spec dates back to 2006! And worst of all: it only saw lukewarm adoption by the datacenter industry, so there hasn't really been a reason for manufacturers to refresh their lineups. This means that SFP+ transceiver you buy in 2026 might be using chips manufactured using a 20-year-old node. No wonder it is running hot!
2.5GBASE-T and 5GBASE-T are essentially using the same technology, but you don't hear anyone complaining about it running hot: hardware for this only recently started to become available due to consumer demand, so any hardware for that is being manufactured using more modern technology, which means a lower power use.
It's still going to consume more power than fiber, but a modern 10GBASE-T SFP+ transceiver should not be burning hot.
Ah, thanks! That helps explain why it seemed like a sort of poorly executed/ill conceived product. Any good brands you know of? I think I just got something random from FS.com or maybe even Amazon.
Fiber runs cool because it's operating well within the physical capacity of the channel. Copper needs an incredibly high signal to noise ratio to overcome the limitations of its medium. Copper will consume 5-10x more power than fiber for the same # of bits transmitted.
10G is looking to be the end for twisted-pair copper.
25GBASE-T and 40GBASE-T were standardized 10 years ago, but there are still basically zero products available with support for it. The datacenter market just wasn't interested and chose to use fiber and DAC instead. Worst of all: it requires Cat8 cables and is limited to 30 meters. This means it can't reuse existing cabling, and doesn't have the reach for many home applications - OPs blog post mentions the longest run in their apartment being 55 meters.
Combine that with the general death of wired networking for home & office use, and it is extremely unlikely the market of hardcore tech enthusiasts is big enough to warrant massive investments into developing some kind of 25G-over-Cat6-for-100m standard.
10G is pretty much the standard for high-end gear these days. This means any kind of future-proof setup needs to be prepared for a future upgrade to a fiber-based technology.
They get less hot (especially the network adapters on the ends of them), can go a lot further, can be a lot denser (including being able to carry things other than Ethernet in the same bundle), and are a lot more future-proof (unless the cable jacket literally crumbles at the slightest movement in a few years).
Ethernet can be run over copper or fiber cabling, it's not an alternative to fiber networking. Assuming you meant what's the advantage of fiber over copper: you can use faster speeds, longer distances less power on fiber plus it's not electrically coupled.
(speeds: 100 gig today, but faster speeds are coming.)
For me, it was for a nearly 100ft run that try as I may to get a good termination, I'd often find my Mac Studio and Ubiquiti EdgeSwitch struggle to negotiate at more than 5gbps. So I got a smaller switch upstairs, ran 10GbE to it, approximately 10ft, and then ran OM-3 fiber for the 100ft up into my attic, across my house and down into the garage. Rock solid at 10 Gbps.
For me, I wanted my networking to be future proof over the next 25 years if Im going to be putting all that work in to wire up the house. My ISP already offers 5Gb/s upstream and will most likely offer 10Gb/s in the coming years.
I'm kind of going the opposite way. I've got 10gig internet, and I planned on running fiber for future-proofing in our remodel, but the past 20 years has taught me that fiber's day is coming "real soon like now" for a long time... and then copper keeps up because everyone uses it.
This is the most compelling reason (unless you really need the range of fiber) - 10GbE can be really power hungry. Each 10G switch port that is in use adds something like 1-5 watts to the power budget. 1 watt is reasonable but most switch hardware isn't nearly that efficient. That could mean 10 watts for every single link if you're using 5 watts at each end. Multiply that by several links and it starts to add up really quickly.
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