What makes Google unique here? I can think of many other companies who have similar scale or even larger incentives for abuse but never seem to fail to engage to the same degree as Google does.
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.
Nothing other than Google is obsesed with automating things with half baked machine learning solutions and thinking they don't need a service desk with humans.
Other companies automate a lot but its way easier to get to a person. Twitter, Facebook, Amazon - they will all get back to you in under 48 hours and actually undo what the machines have done.
Well, maybe not Twitter? I've used their hidden platform team contact form about 4 times and I've never heard a response from them.
I say hidden because there's a hard to find page that lists all of the contact forms, except the platform contact form isn't on there. You just kinda of... have to know it exists somehow.
The main difference is traditional large companies aren't nearly as valuable or profitable because they employ a increasing number of support and customer service staff.
The only reason Google is as profitable as it is is because it's happy to automatically delete people's livelihoods programmatically for free.
