What are good examples of Reinvest Software? My guess would be Amazon, but what others?
YouTube is another, as far as we can tell it’s currently extremely profitable yet people looking at their financials where laughing at the sale price when Google Snatched it up. Part of this is from ever more advertising coupled with ever lower bandwidth costs.
Youtube's profit model is only profitable at google scale - imagine the capital expenditure to build out such a large video platform (not very many other tech giants have been able to build video, and have it be free).
What is the value of viewership data apart from advertising?
I don't know if that's true - youtube ad revenue seems to be ~10% of total google ad revenue; so for that to be true youtube data would have to provide 10% revenue boost to existing ads over all the other (many!) data sources that google has, and I'm not certain if it's realistic.
PS: People are watching on the order of 1 Billion hours per day of video so IMO those revenue numbers may be low as that’s 1$ of revenue per ~15 hours of video watched.
The fact that google chose not to reveal youtube's financials is stark evidence that it's financials aren't great (otherwise, disclosing it should lead to better stock prices for google!).
I suspect if anything they don’t want to break out the financials because it would invite more competition. That or YouTube is tied so closely to the rest of the company it’s hard to separate the numbers.
Anecdotally, the fact that YouTube is flooding their channels with more and more advertisements would seem to indicate that they are NOT profitable at all.
I now loathe YouTube links and highly encourage people to try to put their video content anywhere else (even their own webpage--hosting is a lot cheaper now).