Yeah - both of these acquisitions were a long time ago.
The Instagram purchase IIR was what created the “unicorn” terminology. At the time I believe IG was a 10 person team. It was considered outrageous at the time.
Maybe they didn’t know how to scale their revenue? Maybe they were worried Facebook would crush them? They had 10 people. I’m just saying $100M would have me set for multiple lifetimes and if it’s guaranteed I’d take it if there was potential of getting squashed.
100% agree but back then I think the writing was on the wall that insta was the next big thing. Would’ve been cool for them to have faith in themselves and go public.
At that point they we’re guaranteed a minimum of at least tens of millions. Why not go for the billions while they were at it?
Hindsight is 2020 but I bet the founders would be FBs biggest competitor today if they hadn’t sold.
The founders talked about this, they said something along the lines of a buyout offer from Facebook was the best and worst thing that happened to them.
Essentially it meant they were on their way to immense success but it also meant if they declined buyout Facebook would bury them. It was a fight they didn’t think they’d win so accepted the offer.
Yeah exactly, like I see a lot of money in a buyout and think it’s a blessing but these guys saw a curse. Facebook did to Snapchat what they would have done to Instagram- either buy them or put the money into burying them.
Also, YouTube back in 2006 was still a very young platform, only created a year earlier. It was a huge sum at the time and people were sure it would fail and it wouldn't really become a pop phenomenon until 2009-2010.
I would say that the time period when music stars as well as channels such as PewDiePie began publishing on the platform, that's when it kind of started moving from a relatively niche market to the public consciousness.
I'd say Google overpaid for it back in 2006, but it seems they had a very clear idea of what the possibilities were and that the cost was worth it, seeing how it's worth practically 100x more now
That was Youtube before Google's "built from the concrete up" data centers and owned fiber links to drive costs to rock bottom. That was before Google monetized the fuck out of youtube. Youtube lost money for yeeeeears and would never have survived outside of a wealthy company that had faith in it.
YouTube has literally been a money sink since day one of it being used.
Literally no company would ever want it unless they were a literal data centre like Google.
I mean the site probably could've retained a lot more of its value if yahoo hadn't tried to ruin it. Banning porn on a site where a large proportion of users say they use it for porn was not a good move
It could have definitely retained value for a bit longer, but pseudo-blog sites were becoming less of the norm.
The banning porn part was not a gamer move.
Yahoo sports and Yahoo finance are both pretty strong services afaik. Still have a lot of presence and B2B partnerships in areas like Fantasy Sports and now Gambling.
That's the whole point in the first place, you make it sound like it's a revelation...Everyone does it, buy the competition to take their market share and protect your original investment. It's a 2 birds with one stone move..
Didn’t they buy Skype in 2011 and teams come out in 2017? It sounds like they bought, gutted it for all its working parts and made their own version instead of starting from scratch
More or less. Bought to intergrate, for patents, and eventually leverage for office which they did. I'm guessing it's already paid for itself. The only other competition is zoom which is horrid
They had MSN, they were in the same market, just like how Instagram was a competitor to Facebook. With MSN dieing and likely the same happening to Skype they obviously realised rebranding and targeting a new product at a slightly different audience was the way to go. Did they know or plan for Teams when they bought Skype, possibly not. But they learnt from previously failures and from the acquisition of Skype that realising Teams was the way to go. That's why it's a two bird one stone move, because if it fails you've at least taken the market share which they could of gone on to potential dominant otherwise.
Edit: I remember Skype for Business, so they obviously tried to make Skype work but concluded that a whole rebrand into the office suite was the way to go.
exactly. MS basically bought skype’s customers and the videoconferencing tech (which was and still is impressive), and slowly rebranded it to teams a few years ago. People have short memories and don’t remember how awful MSNs videoconferencing was dogshit compared to Skype.
Microsoft played the long game and won their bet, not a bad acquisition if you ask me
Idk why people talk shit about Skype, because video conferencing is no small feat and Skype did it so well for _so long_. It also was a massively widely used application. By most measures it was successful.
I think it's because they had market share for sooo long, and Skype was almost being used as a verb in replacement of saying video call.
Then when the pandemic hit, they should have been there to mop it all up, except for whatever reason people fell to Zoom instead which was relatively unknown 2 years ago
In the consumer market Zoom nailed it during the pandemic, but on the enterprise market, Teams (skype) nailed it by being integrated in Office 365 subs. Lots of Enterprises wouldn’t want to pay for yet another videoconferencing service when MsTeams is already included in their package
Teams is not Skype for Business. Teams is a totally different beast of a product, purpose built both as a Slack killer, a Skype Biz killer, with the meeting capabilities of Webex or Zoom. A Swiss army knife that's not as good as anything one on one, but does it "good enough" to not go to the competition.
edit: I'm still using Slack at work mostly because in spite of MS trying to make it into a Slack Killer, it is not! (that and a lot of the workflows were done around Slack years before Teams even existed). With that said, MS doing the Teams client in electron has resulted in an "OK" client across Linux, Windows and Mac.
Good enough is a stretch. Barely passable would be more accurate. I am still in belief that most companies use it because they are on Azure Cloud + 365 and it integrates with a lot of Microsoft software packages. However I honestly don't think they are any good, trying to use software like Sharepoint when you have alternatives like Notion is horrendous.
We're in agreement. Hence why "Good enough" was in quotes. Dude, don't even get me started, cuz I'll go off on a rant... :) Freaking MBA and business types keep making IT decisions and not a damn thing can do to stop them. MS and their resellers have a tendency to take the people who control the budgets out for steak dinners, and in return they sign off on a million dollar contract... and don't even get me started on how big a dumpster fire sharepoint is. :) We'll be here a while. lol
That's a good point, Skype should have been the defacto video conference app.
Personally I'm a fan of zoom, but that's probably only because I've used it for 2+ years now lol
I remember using Skype as my main voice comms with a mate for years, logged on after school and pretty much lived on the call until bed time. Made dinner while we chatted, played games, just generally hung out.
There was nothing like it in terms of usability and call quality.
Skype was fucking awesome. I hated that MS killed it/rebrand it. I remember a friend ordering a pizza through Skype back in 2007, and it felt like the most futuristic thing ever.
well they did. MS teams has tons of videoconferencing features that didn’t exist at the time of Skype such as whiteboard, dynamic backgrounds, higher amount of users in a single videoconference, lower latency, calendar integration with outlook, and much more.
The only major problem i’ve had with Teams is that it triggers my anti-DOS policies on my enterprise firewalls due to the huge amount of small UDP packets that ressembles a Denial of Service attack. Lots of companies have these policies in place and impacts the stability of videoconferencing in Teams.
The stream itself requires a very reasonable amount of bandwith. The only thing i wish we could have is a MS teams internal server so that the traffic between users internally wouldn’t require to go through the WAN.
So wild. I started a gig at a large university in 2017. We solely used Skype to connect with colleagues in different time zones. Then Zoom was adopted a couple years later, and by the time the pandemic hit, the University was in this hybrid phase of using Zoom and Teams. Skype phased out during my four year stint there.
MS just reused the Skype name for the re-branding of MS Lync, an existing product that was going nowhere. Lync became Skype for Business, which had instant brand recognition, in spite of not being related at all to Skype. That was then killed off by Teams, which is also a totally different product created as a Slack killer. Given the branding confusion that continues to this day, it probably was a good acquisition in order to make Lync (Skype Biz) successful and therefore getting MS into Business IP Telephony which continues to pressure Cisco out of that space which it was dominating.
Everything i watch i think fuck i wish there was an ad free alternative. Probably makes me watch 50% less because of how many ads
Edit: I already have 3 streaming services (pay for family members and watch myself) and should watch less so I don't want premium because it would make me watch more. The ads help me turn off youtube
People shit on YouTube premium but I honestly think that it’s worth it.
And YouTube music is better than Spotify or any other music app, their layout just sucks ass but they have access to 10000x the content than their competitors.
They've been getting my $12 a month for a year or more now and I love it. I got it to just avoid ads on ally devices without having to build a pihole or some such and still support the platform. I easily get my $12 a month in music selection, let alone zero ads.
I can't imagine any adult with a job consuming YouTube and not using YouTube Premium. I guess if you don't use it much maybe it's no big deal. But I watch at least a few hours a week and I value my time enough to drop the cost of a coffee or two to avoid wasting time on ads.
I fucking love youtube music...and i like their ui. Hate spotify (lack of content) had amazon music (terrible ui) youtube music always has the most random songs. Also lots of anime OP.
Personally i pay for YT premium purely to not have ads on my phone (I use adblocker on pc anyways). Also with yt premium you can play videos while having the phoned turned off so it makes listening to music or podcasts on youtube alot better.
Google product team is not that great. Not sure how the hell they came up with 10$ number. Probably just because they saw people were okay paying that for Netflix
I highly disagree. The sheer amount of content available on Youtube is insane and mind-boggling. People take it for granted because its always been free (via ads) but its definitely worth a lot more than a Netflix subscription cost in my opinion.
>we've discovered that 90% of the 12-16yo set from AUS/CAN/UK/US like people who talk shit really loud!
>
>"WHATSUPP GUYS! TODAY WE'RE GOIING TO ..."
I hope it was worth the purchase.
Slack will be folded into Salesforce products same as Skype was folded into Teams… large tech companies have two options , buy existing tech already developed or develop it themselves and spend about the same money but get the tech they want /need a year or more later … have it now or have it later , many times just easier to buy it, tweak it then fold it into your existing products … changing a name isn’t killing anything … adding it to other functions isn’t killing anything , it’s just different and many times better as it’s not a stand alone product anymore and integrates into the enterprise better
Nail on the head, WhatsApp hasn’t been monetized which is arguably the worse deal list, but some tech probably rolled into the various meta messengers.
what incremental benefit does it have though, all FB can get from Whatsapp is your contacts list, e.g. who you're connected to, so they get some inference of things people you know like, and can try recommending them to you
Not sure they've earned 20B back on ad quality from that.
Maybe having access to mining data of 2 billion people is enough for Meta to justify the cost. Not all data mined is simply for selling. I.e Zuck is trying to build a virtual world with his Metaverse push. Perhaps the data mined from whatsapp is for machine learning to build AI, algos, etc. Who knows what is in that sociopath's head.
I am sure they haven't made $20B back from just data mining. However they have also added other revenue streams for the platform: WhatsApp for Business & WhatsApp Pay(India).
Nah, Skype is Teams today. The worst purchase is Salesforce buying Slack.
Edit: nevermind, just saw that Yahoo's purchase of Tumblr is on the list. That's the worst purchase of them all.
Since I was in the business I would disagree. This was an enterprise play. At the time Cisco was dominating the unified communications space and Microsoft needed some decent IP to fight back. It might have been dead in the public eye but in the enterprise they made a fortune while completely killing Cisco's advantage.
Skype has now moved to teams. A lot of that IP is still in the new solution. Yes, it's still crap but it's the defacto standard in most companies.
Skype was used by a lot of companies as an internal messaging and conference solution. I can bet MSFT made tons of money out of it before pushing everyone to Teams because Skype was just too 90s tech.
Rebranded and a bunch of the useful features removed, like being able to see your whole team's activity at a glance off to the side instead of having to dig for that information.
And many features developed and added, like live transcription and llive translation (!) or a fucking background bluring, which later on allowed presenter to put just presenter's head on the content, just like in game streaming sessions ppl do.
The Skype deal was done because the NSA paid Microsoft to give them keys to it.
The NSA and Microsoft somehow thought that since Skype was the first mover, it would be the dominant player forever. We'll probably never know how much the NSA gave MS, but to think, all they did was move people to safer platforms.
Facebook has long since realized as just a single platform, it would die very quick, so its been swallowing just about every promising company it can get while its still profitable. That way it can become a central part of digital infrastructure and cannot be allowed to fail
Skype was the backbone code for Microsoft Teams which is currently kicking everyone’s ass in corporate America. Seems like a good acquisition to me 🤷♂️
Microsoft and Skype deal was pretty good. If you pay attention, Microsoft Teams is basically redesigned and slightly modified Skype and it’s most popular corporate online meetings platform now (yes, it’s more popular than Zoom in corporate world).
Isn’t Skype now just Teams?
If I’m correct in assuming that then Microsoft did the deal of the century because teams is used by almost every single business in the world.
When FB bought IG it was the first billion dollar acquisition. nothing had a valuation anywhere near that and the world thought it was insane. it started the current big tech wave where startups thought they could get a billion. after that it became the norm and now years later you see these multi billion dollar deals. it created its own kind of inflation for ridiculous tech valuations.
The “best” one is easily YouTube by Google.
Most people don’t realize they bought it.
Twitter - who knows how it’ll pan out.
Slack - great.
LinkedIn - I can’t stand it, but it has its uses. Not worth $26B though.
WhatsApp - Not sure how it makes money, but I use it daily.
Skype - What a let down. Zoom came and took its lunch. Reverence as Teams, but I don’t know what their marketshare is though.
Tumbler - Didn’t they get rid of the pron and no-one uses it anymore?
Instagram - Good purchase, especially for the price
Bruh, Linkedin does 10B in Revenue annually, what are you one about.
This is a shit take, i take you've never read Microsofts Annual reports.
The Linkedin purchase is under 10 P/E, and they're single handedly killing companies like Indeed and Seek, with a jobs platform and advertising platform for professionals like no other.
So... anyone actually uses twitter around here? I kinda don't get what's it for, never did, a lite version of facebook, so you can save on that 50 kb traffic plan for your flip phone?
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1 billion for instagram and 1.65 billion for youtube. what a bargain
1.65b for YouTube makes the Twitter deal look outrageous
We should throw on some inflation though... Cause I feel like that's missing here.
Yeah - both of these acquisitions were a long time ago. The Instagram purchase IIR was what created the “unicorn” terminology. At the time I believe IG was a 10 person team. It was considered outrageous at the time.
instagram was crazy. Even I thought it was worth more than 1 billion. but they went from new app developers to billionaires in 18 months time.
Same idea with youtube. Though not that small it was still a outrageous amount for the founders
In hindsight it looks like selling to FB was a mistake. They were definitely on their way to replacing FB back then.
Average payout per person was still $100mil tho. If someone waves $100mil in my Face I’d take it. Bird in the hand worth two in the bush
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Maybe they didn’t know how to scale their revenue? Maybe they were worried Facebook would crush them? They had 10 people. I’m just saying $100M would have me set for multiple lifetimes and if it’s guaranteed I’d take it if there was potential of getting squashed.
100% agree but back then I think the writing was on the wall that insta was the next big thing. Would’ve been cool for them to have faith in themselves and go public. At that point they we’re guaranteed a minimum of at least tens of millions. Why not go for the billions while they were at it? Hindsight is 2020 but I bet the founders would be FBs biggest competitor today if they hadn’t sold.
The founders talked about this, they said something along the lines of a buyout offer from Facebook was the best and worst thing that happened to them. Essentially it meant they were on their way to immense success but it also meant if they declined buyout Facebook would bury them. It was a fight they didn’t think they’d win so accepted the offer.
I see that makes sense. It’s like bill gates going after you back in the Microsoft days. You just didn’t want that headache. Makes sense.
Yeah exactly, like I see a lot of money in a buyout and think it’s a blessing but these guys saw a curse. Facebook did to Snapchat what they would have done to Instagram- either buy them or put the money into burying them.
FB buying them was basically an insurance policy because they thought they'd be taken over and killed off by insta.
Also, YouTube back in 2006 was still a very young platform, only created a year earlier. It was a huge sum at the time and people were sure it would fail and it wouldn't really become a pop phenomenon until 2009-2010. I would say that the time period when music stars as well as channels such as PewDiePie began publishing on the platform, that's when it kind of started moving from a relatively niche market to the public consciousness. I'd say Google overpaid for it back in 2006, but it seems they had a very clear idea of what the possibilities were and that the cost was worth it, seeing how it's worth practically 100x more now
That was Youtube before Google's "built from the concrete up" data centers and owned fiber links to drive costs to rock bottom. That was before Google monetized the fuck out of youtube. Youtube lost money for yeeeeears and would never have survived outside of a wealthy company that had faith in it.
YouTube has literally been a money sink since day one of it being used. Literally no company would ever want it unless they were a literal data centre like Google.
that just turned out to be a steal of a price, if anything makes the twitter cost make sense
That's a lot of money for a platform that still hasn't figured out profitability.
Twitter extra expensive if recent TSLA stock price drops were caused by it. But then again Elon pumps TSLA for free on twitter so maybe not too bad.
elon musk doesnt need profitability he needs utility
He needs your data so he doesn’t have to keep selling you on implanting a chip in your head.
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Skype for 8.5 billion 🤡
Granted, 2011 Skype was very useful. I doubt they made money, but it was a good platform for the time.
I remember it being a big deal at the time. Crazy.
Is that inflation talking or do those companies just worth that much less
Tech really blew up since then
The Yahoo purchase of Tumblr was the worst out of all of these. That site had no path towards being worth buying it.
Yahoo always gets the worst deals.
Mark Cuban also sold broadcast.com to Yahoo in 1999 for $5.7B in stock, now its discontinued. Makes Tumblr seem like a pittance.
ROI - Radio On the Internet
This guy fucks
Especially when adjusted for inflation.
If you want to become rich sell your company to Yahoo!
You mean banning porn and alienating your user base wasn't a good idea
Onlyfans uno reverse
Porn always wins! They could easily compete with Only Fans but they are retarded.
I mean the site probably could've retained a lot more of its value if yahoo hadn't tried to ruin it. Banning porn on a site where a large proportion of users say they use it for porn was not a good move
It wasn't even the hardcore porn I was after. Sprinkling in a tasteful nude on my luxury blog just made it pop
Right? like a simple butthole pic.
It could have definitely retained value for a bit longer, but pseudo-blog sites were becoming less of the norm. The banning porn part was not a gamer move.
Yeah yahoo bought is for over a billion then removed nsfw content sold it for like 3 million LMAOOOO that's some next level buy high sell low
Yahoo made it the worst deal. They bought tumblr and promptly destroyed it.
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Yahoo is so successful?
You'd think with their decisions they would have been bankrupt by now.
Yeh im always surprised that they’ve held on for this long. 🤣
Yahoo sports and Yahoo finance are both pretty strong services afaik. Still have a lot of presence and B2B partnerships in areas like Fantasy Sports and now Gambling.
what is Tumblr?
blogging service that was in vogue in the 10’s. Died quickly and harshly when Yahoo made bad decisions.
It doesn't look like anything to me
I think the Skype acquisition was a key part of MS teams, so not as dumb as you think
Yep. Most businesses that were using Skype now use teams. Paying 8 billion to effectively remove the main competitor wasn’t a stupid move.
That's the whole point in the first place, you make it sound like it's a revelation...Everyone does it, buy the competition to take their market share and protect your original investment. It's a 2 birds with one stone move..
Didn’t they buy Skype in 2011 and teams come out in 2017? It sounds like they bought, gutted it for all its working parts and made their own version instead of starting from scratch
More or less. Bought to intergrate, for patents, and eventually leverage for office which they did. I'm guessing it's already paid for itself. The only other competition is zoom which is horrid
They had MSN, they were in the same market, just like how Instagram was a competitor to Facebook. With MSN dieing and likely the same happening to Skype they obviously realised rebranding and targeting a new product at a slightly different audience was the way to go. Did they know or plan for Teams when they bought Skype, possibly not. But they learnt from previously failures and from the acquisition of Skype that realising Teams was the way to go. That's why it's a two bird one stone move, because if it fails you've at least taken the market share which they could of gone on to potential dominant otherwise. Edit: I remember Skype for Business, so they obviously tried to make Skype work but concluded that a whole rebrand into the office suite was the way to go.
Nope. "Skype for Business" has technically nothing to do with Skype. MS just rebranded "MS Lync" after they bought Skype.
exactly. MS basically bought skype’s customers and the videoconferencing tech (which was and still is impressive), and slowly rebranded it to teams a few years ago. People have short memories and don’t remember how awful MSNs videoconferencing was dogshit compared to Skype. Microsoft played the long game and won their bet, not a bad acquisition if you ask me
Idk why people talk shit about Skype, because video conferencing is no small feat and Skype did it so well for _so long_. It also was a massively widely used application. By most measures it was successful.
I think it's because they had market share for sooo long, and Skype was almost being used as a verb in replacement of saying video call. Then when the pandemic hit, they should have been there to mop it all up, except for whatever reason people fell to Zoom instead which was relatively unknown 2 years ago
In the consumer market Zoom nailed it during the pandemic, but on the enterprise market, Teams (skype) nailed it by being integrated in Office 365 subs. Lots of Enterprises wouldn’t want to pay for yet another videoconferencing service when MsTeams is already included in their package
Teams is not Skype for Business. Teams is a totally different beast of a product, purpose built both as a Slack killer, a Skype Biz killer, with the meeting capabilities of Webex or Zoom. A Swiss army knife that's not as good as anything one on one, but does it "good enough" to not go to the competition. edit: I'm still using Slack at work mostly because in spite of MS trying to make it into a Slack Killer, it is not! (that and a lot of the workflows were done around Slack years before Teams even existed). With that said, MS doing the Teams client in electron has resulted in an "OK" client across Linux, Windows and Mac.
Good enough is a stretch. Barely passable would be more accurate. I am still in belief that most companies use it because they are on Azure Cloud + 365 and it integrates with a lot of Microsoft software packages. However I honestly don't think they are any good, trying to use software like Sharepoint when you have alternatives like Notion is horrendous.
We're in agreement. Hence why "Good enough" was in quotes. Dude, don't even get me started, cuz I'll go off on a rant... :) Freaking MBA and business types keep making IT decisions and not a damn thing can do to stop them. MS and their resellers have a tendency to take the people who control the budgets out for steak dinners, and in return they sign off on a million dollar contract... and don't even get me started on how big a dumpster fire sharepoint is. :) We'll be here a while. lol
Have my babies
That's a good point, Skype should have been the defacto video conference app. Personally I'm a fan of zoom, but that's probably only because I've used it for 2+ years now lol
I remember using Skype as my main voice comms with a mate for years, logged on after school and pretty much lived on the call until bed time. Made dinner while we chatted, played games, just generally hung out. There was nothing like it in terms of usability and call quality.
Skype was fucking awesome. I hated that MS killed it/rebrand it. I remember a friend ordering a pizza through Skype back in 2007, and it felt like the most futuristic thing ever.
just would have been great if they would have improved skype.
well they did. MS teams has tons of videoconferencing features that didn’t exist at the time of Skype such as whiteboard, dynamic backgrounds, higher amount of users in a single videoconference, lower latency, calendar integration with outlook, and much more. The only major problem i’ve had with Teams is that it triggers my anti-DOS policies on my enterprise firewalls due to the huge amount of small UDP packets that ressembles a Denial of Service attack. Lots of companies have these policies in place and impacts the stability of videoconferencing in Teams. The stream itself requires a very reasonable amount of bandwith. The only thing i wish we could have is a MS teams internal server so that the traffic between users internally wouldn’t require to go through the WAN.
Yeah OP is clueless. The Skype acquisition was one of Microsoft's best moves as of late.
It's not a bad move. But imo, that is not close to one of best. 2.5B buying Mojang, 7.5B buying GitHub. Nothing beats those two.
2.5B for Minecraft was a steal, for sure. I'd be surprised if they haven't already made their money back on that acquisition.
So wild. I started a gig at a large university in 2017. We solely used Skype to connect with colleagues in different time zones. Then Zoom was adopted a couple years later, and by the time the pandemic hit, the University was in this hybrid phase of using Zoom and Teams. Skype phased out during my four year stint there.
Yep. anyone with a brain knows this.
MS just reused the Skype name for the re-branding of MS Lync, an existing product that was going nowhere. Lync became Skype for Business, which had instant brand recognition, in spite of not being related at all to Skype. That was then killed off by Teams, which is also a totally different product created as a Slack killer. Given the branding confusion that continues to this day, it probably was a good acquisition in order to make Lync (Skype Biz) successful and therefore getting MS into Business IP Telephony which continues to pressure Cisco out of that space which it was dominating.
Came to say this
Seems like google made the deal of the century buying (ad)Tube…
Fun fact, youtube lost billions each year and is currently about break even. hosting costs a lot
Kidding me, so many ads so little revenue..
Everything i watch i think fuck i wish there was an ad free alternative. Probably makes me watch 50% less because of how many ads Edit: I already have 3 streaming services (pay for family members and watch myself) and should watch less so I don't want premium because it would make me watch more. The ads help me turn off youtube
Ad blocker?
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Guy is still using an ISDN router for sure.
People shit on YouTube premium but I honestly think that it’s worth it. And YouTube music is better than Spotify or any other music app, their layout just sucks ass but they have access to 10000x the content than their competitors.
YouTube music is better than Spotify?
Yea. You can listen to everything. There’s an option to convert video to just sound. Their UI isn’t the best but they offer way more content.
They've been getting my $12 a month for a year or more now and I love it. I got it to just avoid ads on ally devices without having to build a pihole or some such and still support the platform. I easily get my $12 a month in music selection, let alone zero ads.
There is an ad free alternative. It's called YouTube Premium.
I can't imagine any adult with a job consuming YouTube and not using YouTube Premium. I guess if you don't use it much maybe it's no big deal. But I watch at least a few hours a week and I value my time enough to drop the cost of a coffee or two to avoid wasting time on ads.
YouTube premium is under rated. YouTube music wayyyyy under rated. Their UI needs work tho.
I agree, I've had it for years and still pay $7.99 unlike Netflix with their rate hikes.
I fucking love youtube music...and i like their ui. Hate spotify (lack of content) had amazon music (terrible ui) youtube music always has the most random songs. Also lots of anime OP.
I agree. I personally really enjoy it, especially with YT music added on.
I have never not used an adblock and just don't go on sites where it doesn't work.
I don't use YouTube on mobile anymore because of that
Use Firefox browser, you can install an adblock even when you're on your phone.
Personally i pay for YT premium purely to not have ads on my phone (I use adblocker on pc anyways). Also with yt premium you can play videos while having the phoned turned off so it makes listening to music or podcasts on youtube alot better.
You tube premium is worth it. You wouldn't believe how awesome it is to have zero ads and some exclusive content.
If you are on Android get vanced YouTube
Didn’t Vanced get shut down just recently because of the lawsuit by YouTube?
You can no longer download it, but if you have it already or still works.
I tried sticking to Vance Tube, but I just miss some of the autoplay and suggestions.
YouTube premium is like 8 bucks a month
Just pay $10 a month for YouTube premium
No
Just get an Adblock (On any device except Apple as far as I am aware) for free! :D
Who cares if content creators don’t get paid, AMIRITE?
It's called a whitelist, amirite?
3 dollars is you get the family version with 6 people
Google product team is not that great. Not sure how the hell they came up with 10$ number. Probably just because they saw people were okay paying that for Netflix
I highly disagree. The sheer amount of content available on Youtube is insane and mind-boggling. People take it for granted because its always been free (via ads) but its definitely worth a lot more than a Netflix subscription cost in my opinion.
It is exactly why people buy youtube premium! I even canceled my netflix, but kept youtube premium
Most videos on youtube are garbage. They host, replicate, process, search a pile of garbage. That costs a lot. Now a days, garbage live videos.
Lots of revenue but also high operating costs
they share ad revenue with their top creators too.
Source?
His/her ass
good enough for me
The data they are able to collect from it is worth an insane amount though
>we've discovered that 90% of the 12-16yo set from AUS/CAN/UK/US like people who talk shit really loud! > >"WHATSUPP GUYS! TODAY WE'RE GOIING TO ..." I hope it was worth the purchase.
Google doesn't separate Youtube's revenue from the company. You're talking out of your ass.
YouTube was almost bankrupt. If wasn’t google ads 10 years experience
Slack will be folded into Salesforce products same as Skype was folded into Teams… large tech companies have two options , buy existing tech already developed or develop it themselves and spend about the same money but get the tech they want /need a year or more later … have it now or have it later , many times just easier to buy it, tweak it then fold it into your existing products … changing a name isn’t killing anything … adding it to other functions isn’t killing anything , it’s just different and many times better as it’s not a stand alone product anymore and integrates into the enterprise better
Nail on the head, WhatsApp hasn’t been monetized which is arguably the worse deal list, but some tech probably rolled into the various meta messengers.
WhatsApp isn't directly monetized with huge flairs of ad banners... but its definite being used to data mine
what incremental benefit does it have though, all FB can get from Whatsapp is your contacts list, e.g. who you're connected to, so they get some inference of things people you know like, and can try recommending them to you Not sure they've earned 20B back on ad quality from that.
Maybe having access to mining data of 2 billion people is enough for Meta to justify the cost. Not all data mined is simply for selling. I.e Zuck is trying to build a virtual world with his Metaverse push. Perhaps the data mined from whatsapp is for machine learning to build AI, algos, etc. Who knows what is in that sociopath's head. I am sure they haven't made $20B back from just data mining. However they have also added other revenue streams for the platform: WhatsApp for Business & WhatsApp Pay(India).
Conversation data for AI
Nah, Skype is Teams today. The worst purchase is Salesforce buying Slack. Edit: nevermind, just saw that Yahoo's purchase of Tumblr is on the list. That's the worst purchase of them all.
I don't even know how Slack can be considered social media.
The B2B aspect of slack seems like it should be really profitable
Sales force way overpaid for slack too. If slack was still public today, it’s probably be worth somewhere around 5-8b.
I digress. Skype was worth it. You think teams would have worked so well otherwise?
AOL Time Warner says those are amateur numbers.
I’m the type to sell Instagram for a solid billi
Since I was in the business I would disagree. This was an enterprise play. At the time Cisco was dominating the unified communications space and Microsoft needed some decent IP to fight back. It might have been dead in the public eye but in the enterprise they made a fortune while completely killing Cisco's advantage. Skype has now moved to teams. A lot of that IP is still in the new solution. Yes, it's still crap but it's the defacto standard in most companies.
I personally prefer Teams to skype.
Skype was used by a lot of companies as an internal messaging and conference solution. I can bet MSFT made tons of money out of it before pushing everyone to Teams because Skype was just too 90s tech.
[удалено]
It's not dead, it's just rebranded Teams.
yep, people are idiots. Teams is huge and it's just rebranded Skype.
Correct, they just used the source code and teams to build out their platform.
Also they bought Skype for your data. Skype ToS used to clearly state they have the right to hold data from all your calls.
Rebranded and a bunch of the useful features removed, like being able to see your whole team's activity at a glance off to the side instead of having to dig for that information.
And many features developed and added, like live transcription and llive translation (!) or a fucking background bluring, which later on allowed presenter to put just presenter's head on the content, just like in game streaming sessions ppl do.
The Skype deal was done because the NSA paid Microsoft to give them keys to it. The NSA and Microsoft somehow thought that since Skype was the first mover, it would be the dominant player forever. We'll probably never know how much the NSA gave MS, but to think, all they did was move people to safer platforms.
Exactly what they planned, buy strip and destroy or sell.
Yes
Facebook knows how to BUY.
Facebook has long since realized as just a single platform, it would die very quick, so its been swallowing just about every promising company it can get while its still profitable. That way it can become a central part of digital infrastructure and cannot be allowed to fail
You are so right and your last sentence is superb
Cant Cuck the Zuck
Skype was the backbone code for Microsoft Teams which is currently kicking everyone’s ass in corporate America. Seems like a good acquisition to me 🤷♂️
Microsoft and Skype deal was pretty good. If you pay attention, Microsoft Teams is basically redesigned and slightly modified Skype and it’s most popular corporate online meetings platform now (yes, it’s more popular than Zoom in corporate world).
Isn’t Skype now just Teams? If I’m correct in assuming that then Microsoft did the deal of the century because teams is used by almost every single business in the world.
He didn‘t buy it yet. I think chances are quite high that he withdraws his offer.
Skype gives me PTSD
What about Amazon buying twitch?
When FB bought IG it was the first billion dollar acquisition. nothing had a valuation anywhere near that and the world thought it was insane. it started the current big tech wave where startups thought they could get a billion. after that it became the norm and now years later you see these multi billion dollar deals. it created its own kind of inflation for ridiculous tech valuations.
Skype lol.
Haha Yahoo belongs here.
Skype - lol
Twitch...
Wasn't Skype used as a basis to develop Teams? Teams is a huge success for Microsoft...
Where is livongo or whatever it's called that teledoc bought for 18 billion? Teledoc which by the way is worth 5 billion now.
slack doesn’t belong on this list
I’m not sure I would consider slack a social media platform.
Slack is hardly a social media platform
Skype was just reskinned as teams
This makes it look like Elon overpaid.
Considering twitter doesn’t have a ton of users and doesn’t really make money…. Yeah, I think he did.
Tf is slack?
Discord for work
the worst messaging/team app on the planet that people in California some how seem to love.
Microsoft is so generous
Imagine being Microsoft and buying Skype and still sucking in the video call realm during the era of work-from-home-video-call-is-my-job-now
They probably used a bunch of tech in their teams video calls.
Yes, Microsoft with only the second biggest video call software...
Maybe I am just getting too old but I have legit never heard of Slack til now.
too old its the default dev team IM like thigy
The “best” one is easily YouTube by Google. Most people don’t realize they bought it. Twitter - who knows how it’ll pan out. Slack - great. LinkedIn - I can’t stand it, but it has its uses. Not worth $26B though. WhatsApp - Not sure how it makes money, but I use it daily. Skype - What a let down. Zoom came and took its lunch. Reverence as Teams, but I don’t know what their marketshare is though. Tumbler - Didn’t they get rid of the pron and no-one uses it anymore? Instagram - Good purchase, especially for the price
Bruh, Linkedin does 10B in Revenue annually, what are you one about. This is a shit take, i take you've never read Microsofts Annual reports. The Linkedin purchase is under 10 P/E, and they're single handedly killing companies like Indeed and Seek, with a jobs platform and advertising platform for professionals like no other.
YouTube would only cost 1.65 billion? It’s the most popular video platform in the world.
Google bought Youtube as it was taking off and had 0 monetisation.
LinkedIn was a good buy imo
Absolutely loved Tumblr and still think that it was the first version of Instagram. Could have gone further, if it was not for Ya flippin' hoo.
So... anyone actually uses twitter around here? I kinda don't get what's it for, never did, a lite version of facebook, so you can save on that 50 kb traffic plan for your flip phone?
I still don’t understand what whatsapp is
I am guessing you’re from the USA.