Hacker News Reader

I heard that Google was able to get it to break even after a substantial investment to improve efficiency (custom ASICs for transcoding, machine learning models for prioritizing allocation of storage and computing resources).

I think I agree that it probably wouldn't exist. Not very many companies would invest that much to just to break even.

Haven’t checked if this is a reputable source, but:

https://www.tubics.com/blog/youtube-revenue/

I forget the source, but years ago I tried to look it up and it seemed that YouTube was extremely profitable