A glass of pinot noir has leavened my mood somewhat. What can I say, hectoring someone in full dudgeon rarely goes well.

I want to draw attention, however, to your conviction that "Google literally connects the world." It says a lot about what we accept and what we've forgotten. They don't. They really don't. At best, they reduce friction by a marginal amount. Let's be honest - Bing isn't radically worse than Google, DuckDuckGo isn't radically worse than Bing. Everything Google does, someone else does it almost as well; Google just happens to be the least-expensive, most-polished slightly-more-ubiquitous solution in every space they thrive in and any space they don't thrive, they abandon (along with everyone that signed onto their technology). More than that, they make it up on volume.

Vimeo is a demonstrably better platform than Youtube. It's also a lot stickier. They made a whopping $81m revenue last year (after giving 90% of incoming sales to creators) but that's more than Youtube, an outfit that still loses money. But then, Youtube can afford to lose money because Google makes $28b in ad revenue and eventually nobody will even remember Vimeo. All they'll remember is click-overlay, loud-shout-out, 2-second-cut useless-facts-you-already-know cheap-graphics think-you-learned-something-but-you-didn't Youtube.

Here's some economics from Hank Green(whom I hate).

Sometime in the last year, my YouTube videos received their billionth view. At the average YouTube ad rate of $2 per thousand views (a $2 CPM), that’s around $2 million in revenue from advertising over the last eight years. Not bad! Though, during those eight years, we have spent more than $4 million on the creation of YouTube videos. So also, not good!

Hey, Hank - where's the real money at?

A 22 minute TV program is accompanied by sixteen 30-second ads, at an average cost of $25 per thousand impressions. That leaves us with a per-minute CPM of around $19. A 5.5 minute YouTube video monetized the same way would make about $100 per thousand impressions. After a billion views, that’s $100,000,000. To be fair, YouTube would have taken 45% of that money,

so really I’m only down $53,000,000.

Actual television advertising is vastly more variable than that. I'll say this: I've got a show that airs on Sundays. In 2010 we sold a block of 6 (off-season, network prime-time) 30-second spots for $250k. There were six of those blocks, the program is 42 minutes long. We averaged 6m viewers that season; $1.5m/6m viewers x 1000 is a CPM of $250.

Fundamentally:

Youtube has created a world where people are falling all over each other for 2 grand per million viewers. This world will never be visited by the people making six figures per million viewers. When your revenue stream is a factor of a thousand less than you're used to, you pack it in and go home, you don't economize.

Multiply by everything Google does.

Importantly - Google is happy to lose money doing this. They're making more money than the Youtubers are and it still isn't enough to sustain itself. As someone whose livelihood lo these 10 years has been directly dependent on massive, heartless studios I've got tales that would curl your toes... but as someone who has also worked with half the fucktards headlining Vidcon any given year, allow me to say with no quaver in my voice that a Youtube future is a dark one.