It's worse than that: It's YoY revenue growth targets that really matter to the stock price, hence the never-ending push to put more ads into places you never expected to see them.
FWIW I've pretty-much given up on YouTube due to the aggressive ad insertions.
Or, in other words, the huge price/earnings of all stocks (even large companies) require that those companies grow even when this is physically impossible. Otherwise there is a huge downwards correction on the price, and people that brought it by the unrealistic price (that's anybody that brought it) lose most of their money.
This is the price of participating in an irrational market.
Replying to myself so as to add the following quote from Rudy Rucker that seems to me terribly apropos:
"I never really understood the ideas in economics, in fact I almost failed to graduate from college because I couldn’t stand going to economics lectures. Hate, hate, hate the stuff. It’s like studying Bible stories or pseudoscience—economics has so little connection to daily reality. For instance, it’s completely obvious that companies can’t in fact grow forever, year after year, without hitting some debilitating limits. But the so-called value of a company is based on how much they grow from quarter to quarter. Economics as practiced by bankers is complete horseshit, but they’ve bought out all the politicians, so nothing reasonable ever gets done. In the long run, of course, the situation will resolve itself. Meanwhile we’re seeing a resurgence of the dystopic SF novel!"
It's worse than that: It's YoY revenue growth targets that really matter to the stock price, hence the never-ending push to put more ads into places you never expected to see them.
FWIW I've pretty-much given up on YouTube due to the aggressive ad insertions.