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Comment by keepper | Hacker News Reader

Urrmm, Youtube, Doubleclick, Waze?

Those have all been industry defining.

As someone stated below, YouTube is still not profitable. Waze is really not adding to their bottom line, and DoubleClick was to increase their advertising reach. It’s really not analogous to their hardware acquisitions.

"YouTube is still not profitable." Are you sure?

https://www.businessofapps.com/data/youtube-statistics/#6

That’s revenue - not profit.

Revenue is not profit. If you search around, analysts mostly suspect YouTube is either not profitable or only slightly profitable.

Google isn't in it for just the money. They want to control our thinking as well, and given the kind of censorship that is happening on YouTube, if it is operating at a loss, they may not mind because it has other less tangible benefits.

For profit public corporations do everything for the money. There is no ulterior motive.

Gas stations make hardly any profit on gasoline. The margins on snacks, on the other hand...

Youtube or other platforms may not make strong profits themselves, but contribute strategically or operationally to the overall Alphabet bottom line.

So the discussion here is not 'Is Youtube making a profit' but 'Does Youtube contribute, directly or indirectly, to the overall Google/Alphabet enterprise strategy?'. In that case, it is entirely possible for major acquisitions to not appear to be 'for the money' but are still essential in driving shareholder value.

"as someone stated"...

Google has never released Youtube numbers, so I can't say that. I will tell you that youtube is the dominant video platform on the internet. You do realize Youtube shows ads? and those ads are part of google's ad revenue? But the numbers have been inferred "YouTube probably generates $16 billion to $25 billion in annual revenue"[1]

Waze drives all of their google maps traffic data. Again, industry's best.

Doubleclick is the basis for ALL non text advertising at google.

I'm starting to get the picture you really just want to argue your point, without any actual facts. Google has a verifiable history of successful acquisitions. Just apparently non that you "like"

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/24/technology/youtube-financ...

Your link estimate “revenue” not profit. And none of those are hardware acquisitions - again look at Motorola, HTC’s partial acquisition and Nest.

there are no ads on YT

What? A giant front page ad, one to two pre-roll ads (with accompanying banner ad in the sidebar), semitransparent text ads on the bottom of the video, and another video ad every 4-10 minutes in the video.

Personally I think they are great at finding interesting and relevant ads, which is why I don't block the ads. Howerver I hear the experience varies.

YT does not show ads if you have adblock. Adblock cannot actually block them, but google detects it and chooses to not show them (the idea is that if you have adblock, ads are unlikely to be worth showing to you)

Just an FYI - Google Maps doesn't get traffic or user data from Waze. Maps gets it's data from Android and people who have Google Maps open on their phones.

https://fortune.com/2019/10/11/waze-google-maps-how-it-works...

>Google has never released Youtube numbers //

Can't you just log on to the appropriate USA government website and download the submitted and audited accounts?

Isn't USA supposed to be a bastion of capitalism, and isn't a central feature of capitalism that it optimises the distribution of resources, that optimisation being predicated on readily available information -- the system doesn't optimise at all without information flow.

Please don't tell me Google don't have public accounts???

There shouldn't be any mystery here, you should just be able to read it off the P&L sheets?

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