Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Google has a net income (aka profits) of $34b/yr and Youtube revenues ($16 bil) are about 12% of google's total revenues ($135 bil). If they sunk 12% of their net income (one year of net income growth) into hiring customer support and allocated 12% to youtube, that would be $490mil. Or around 5,000 account reps (avg cost of $100k/yr). At 1800 hrs/yr, that's around 9 mil man-hours they could put towards decent youtube creator relationship support.

My understanding is that there around 30mil youtube channels. Let's say that 10% of those are regular uploaders and maybe 10% of that, it's a major part of their lives. So that's around 300,000 creators. Of those perhaps 30,000 make a living from it.

Most issues that come up can probably be resolved via their current automated systems. If those creators have an average of 1 issue that needs human intervention every year, that's 300,000 cases. Which means apx 30 man-hours per case. If 10 issues that require human intervention, that's still 3 man-hours per case.

The conclusion is that Google can easily afford to provide human customer support to creators on YouTube. They simply refuse to do so in order to make more money or for philosophical reasons. Most likely, they view creators as essentially disposable and don't care if they ruin them or not. "Scale" has little to do with it.



Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: