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Comment by Lambdanaut | Hacker News Reader

> They always had to add ads at some point, hosting video, and the bandwidth and transcoding that goes with it, is incredibly expensive, not to mention the dev time going into creating such a massive platform.

This isn't about covering expenses that they couldn't afford otherwise. This is about making enormously rich people even richer.

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>This isn't about covering expenses that they couldn't afford otherwise. This is about making enormously rich people even richer.

So you truly believe people should be entitled to free video hosting?

It literally costs money to host content. If you make the platform no money, Youtube has no obligation to keep you around. Just because I pay for my groceries doesn't mean you get yours for free. Just because one person is paying doesn't mean an equal numbers of others don't have to.

I simply stated that this isn't about covering necessary expenses that wouldn't have been able to be covered otherwise, which is how you initially framed it.

YouTube made it big encouraging that wide range of creators to come to their platform, then once they've established their monopoly they turn around and kick off the ones that are inconvenient for them. That feels immoral.

Are you sure? Google has been on a kick for some time now to try and ensure each product area is independently profitable. Up until a few years ago the status quo was that search/content ads made all the money, and every other product burned it in a giant furnace of endless massive losses. Seems they're now trying to get a grip on that as they're realising even search ads can't keep growing revenue forever.

It's entirely possible that YouTube has never been profitable. The costs involved with it are stupendous. It's far more than just bandwidth. Storage and CPU for transcoding, the enormous databases required for Content ID, recommendations, comments and anti-spam, all the private videos you can't even see at all, etc. Then there's software development costs to manage the bandwidth and operations.

Most businesses don’t give away products or services away for free on a mass scale despite being able to afford to do so.

But they're not giving it away, they're harvesting massive amounts of information even off of videos without ads.

What value does that information have, other than to sell ads?

>This is about making enormously rich people even richer.

Isn't Youtube still not making a profit?

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