I feel like it’s disingenuous for Google to say they don’t make any money with YouTube when their revenue is largely from ads and selling people’s data. Part of me suspects they’re pulling something akin to movie accounting to claim a loss for tax purposes.
Sure, video hosting and streaming is expensive, but they have been running YouTube for 20 years now. If it was really losing that much money, they would’ve pulled the plug a long time ago.
Do we really know that YouTube doesn’t make any profit at all and there isn’t some creative accounting going on?
I didn’t say Youtube doesn’t make money, I said it’s not profitable, that is, the service alone does not generate enough money to pay for its own existence. If this HackerNews thread is to be believed, it’s unlikely even google execs know whether the thing is actually profitable or not (it did generate 50B USD in revenue in 2023-24, which is obviously a lot, but only 11B more than Netflix (39B) despite serving a much, much wider audience)
Youtube exists in a situation very similar to that of Twitter pre acquisition. It’s a money drain, but it’s extremely useful to control and own. Elon Musk saw that he could buy Twitter, he bought it, ruined its value, but we’re seeing that he didn’t buy “the company”, he bought a significant portion of people’s mindshare, so to speak. When Google bought YT in 2006, they saw the writing on the wall, that high speed internet would lead to more people watching videos, which turned true, and they also used their power to fully consolidate Youtube as the place to watch free videos online. Facebook likely played a bigger hand in destroying any possible competition than Google, but that’s a different story.
I remain skeptical despite Google’s claims and I have to wonder how much money they spend on fighting stuff like ad blocking when most people don’t even use any.
If they actually aren’t profitable (which I doubt), it would be pretty funny if it were because they wasted a shitload of money trying to stop ad blockers.
I feel like it’s disingenuous for Google to say they don’t make any money with YouTube when their revenue is largely from ads and selling people’s data. Part of me suspects they’re pulling something akin to movie accounting to claim a loss for tax purposes.
Sure, video hosting and streaming is expensive, but they have been running YouTube for 20 years now. If it was really losing that much money, they would’ve pulled the plug a long time ago.
Do we really know that YouTube doesn’t make any profit at all and there isn’t some creative accounting going on?
I didn’t say Youtube doesn’t make money, I said it’s not profitable, that is, the service alone does not generate enough money to pay for its own existence. If this HackerNews thread is to be believed, it’s unlikely even google execs know whether the thing is actually profitable or not (it did generate 50B USD in revenue in 2023-24, which is obviously a lot, but only 11B more than Netflix (39B) despite serving a much, much wider audience)
Youtube exists in a situation very similar to that of Twitter pre acquisition. It’s a money drain, but it’s extremely useful to control and own. Elon Musk saw that he could buy Twitter, he bought it, ruined its value, but we’re seeing that he didn’t buy “the company”, he bought a significant portion of people’s mindshare, so to speak. When Google bought YT in 2006, they saw the writing on the wall, that high speed internet would lead to more people watching videos, which turned true, and they also used their power to fully consolidate Youtube as the place to watch free videos online. Facebook likely played a bigger hand in destroying any possible competition than Google, but that’s a different story.
I remain skeptical despite Google’s claims and I have to wonder how much money they spend on fighting stuff like ad blocking when most people don’t even use any.
If they actually aren’t profitable (which I doubt), it would be pretty funny if it were because they wasted a shitload of money trying to stop ad blockers.