They were allowed by regulators to become monopolies, and now that they have control of the market, profits take a backseat to controlling politics. Proving once and for all that at this level, money is secondary to power.
Ben Garrison
Get Woke, Go Broke: How Leftist Identity Politics is Ruining Companies (A Broad Overview)
BRIAN PEREIRA OCTOBER 2nd, 2018
Today we live in a world where the polarization of the political sphere is increasingly creeping into the mainstream. People on both sides engage in boycotts and shaming of companies that they feel don’t adequately represent their views, sometimes these boycotts are understandable and sometimes they are unfounded.
This sort of environment has caused a panic throughout the commercial realm as companies scramble to effectively navigate our highly polarized society. Sometimes these companies make a good choice and decide that they will remain impartial and simply cater to their customers on a general basis. Many other companies however have decided to take a firm stand on which side of the aisle they are planted and further have decided to impose that politics on their customer base. Generally this strategy, known as the “Get Woke” strategy, is being utilized by and for Leftist Identity politics and promulgated by a radical base of activists who see themselves as the final authority on what is acceptable or proper in society.
Many companies that once cared fundamentally about providing their customers with good, effective and entertaining products/services are now run by executives and advised by consultants who are more concerned with virtue signalling. The issue is that generally, half of a companies customer base is going to be of the opposite political position than they are trying to espouse. And on top of that many people don’t want politics in their consumer consumption at all no matter how much they may agree on a personal level. When these corporations decide that pushing a politically motivated social narrative is more important than the happiness of their customer base they tend to lose big, this is the phenomenon known as – Get Woke, Go Broke!
Disney put more than $400 million into Vice Media. Now it says that investment is worthless.
Just a few years ago, big media companies were falling over themselves to bet on Vice Media. Disney made the biggest bet, by putting more than $400 million into the swashbuckling digital publisher.
Now, Disney says all of the money it put into Vice has been incinerated: In investor filings Wednesday, Disney said it no longer thinks it will ever get any return on the investment it made in Vice — a company that at one point was supposedly worth $5.7 billion.
Read More: https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/5/8/18537617/disney-vice-write-off-400-million
Alphabet had more than $70 billion in market cap wiped out, and it says YouTube is one of the problems
Google has a YouTube problem, according to CFO Ruth Porat.
On Monday, after reporting that ad revenue grew 15% versus the 24% it saw a year ago, Google’s parent company Alphabetsaw its stock punished. It fell more than 8% Tuesday afternoon.
According to Porat, YouTube was one of the culprits.
“While YouTube clicks continue to grow at a substantial pace in the first quarter, the rate of YouTube click growth rate decelerated versus a strong Q1 last year, reflecting changes that we made in early 2018, which we believe are overall additive to the user and advertiser experience,” Porat said on the company’s earnings call Monday.
Porat didn’t expand on precisely what changes at YouTube led to the poor ad revenue growth, and Google isn’t saying anything beyond her statements from Monday.
But if you wind the clock back a year, it’s easy to see what happened.
In the first quarter of 2018, Google began making changes to YouTube’s algorithms designed to stop harmful content from appearing in the feed of recommended videos you see on the side of a video page.
The goal was to make it harder to find videos full of conspiracy theories, fake news and all that other detritus that occasionally sent advertisers fleeing from the platform. Instead of YouTube directing you to a conspiracy theory about the latest school shooting, you were shown related videos from “authoritative” news sources the company considered worthy of bringing you accurate information.
On top of that, YouTube has removed millions of channels and videos that violated the company’s harmful content policies, most notably Alex Jones.
But all of those garbage videos also kept engagement high. It kept YouTube users tuned in to their feeds beyond the video they came to watch, even if the company said they only made up less than 1% of all videos on the site.
YouTube was literally incentivized to keep its algorithms pumping junk to the top of people’s feeds so people would keep watching and the ad dollars would keep flowing. A devastating Bloomberg report earlier this month showed that for years YouTube executives ignored warnings from their own employees that the misinformation and nastiness on the site had gotten out of hand.
Read More: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/30/youtube-algorithm-changes-negatively-impact-google-ad-revenue.html
How YouTube’s Shifting Algorithms Hurt Independent Media
By Amanda Hess
At the age of 21, David Pakman started a little Massachusetts community radio talk program. While the young broadcaster got his show syndicated on a few public radio stations, it was a YouTube channel he began in 2009, “The David Pakman Show,” that opened up his progressive political commentary to a whole new digital audience. The show has since amassed 353,000 subscribers, and roughly half of its revenue now comes from the ads that play before his videos. He earns enough to produce the show full time and pay a lean staff.
Or, at least, he used to. Last month YouTube announced abrupt, vague changes to its automated processes for placing ads across the platform. Ads on Mr. Pakman’s YouTube channel evaporated, dropping to as little as 6 cents a day, and forcing him to set up a crowdfunding page to help cover $20,000 a month in operating costs.
“This is an existential threat to the show,” Mr. Pakman said. “We need that money.”
Since its 2005 debut with the slogan “Broadcast Yourself,” YouTube has positioned itself as a place where any people with camera phones can make a career of their creativity and thrive free of the grip of corporate media gatekeepers. But in order to share in the advertising wealth a user base of more than a billion can provide, independent producers like Mr. Pakman must satisfy the demands of YouTube’s unfeeling, opaque and shifting algorithms.