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Comment by bombcar | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that what GitHub does is relatively reproducible (Gitlab, gitea, bitbucket? others do it) but the value GitHub provides is free hosting for so much content.

Anyone can make an image hosting site, making one profitable long term is always the problem. For now, GitHub is winning because of the free side of their toolset.

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I'm fairly sure Microsoft doesn't even have the ambition to make it profitable. Like Youtube for Google, or costco hotdogs, it's to get a foot in the door (or rather, customers' feet in your doors) to upsell people on all your other products.

Why do you think YouTube isn’t profitable? Plenty of ads in it and bringing in something like $15 bln/year in revenue. Don’t know exactly the COGS, etc., but hard to say they aren’t making money. Android is probably a much better example than YouTube.

> Why do you think YouTube isn’t profitable? Plenty of ads in it and bringing in something like $15 bln/year in revenue

The infrastructure to store and deliver seamlessly zettabytes of video all around the world surely doesn't come cheaply.

For Google it probably comes about as cheap as it can for anyone, and based on a cursory search, the revenue YouTube makes minus the cost of paying the content creators and employees leaves (probably) enough for the datacenters and decent profit.

Though Google is likely doing accounting shenanigans with cross-company billing and charges YouTube "just enough" for the datacenter/cloud access that, on paper, it's barely breaking even (if only for tax advantages). But I don't have proof of that.

YouTube was burning money for years. They might actually be making money now with the rise in memberships and superchats (and more aggressive ads), but it took what, ten years to get there?

Youtube was founded 15 years ago, and might, possibly be profitable now… but I still doubt it. Between the eternally escalating storage and bandwidth requirements, political pressure to involve more humans in content moderation keeps rising too.

GitHub was a profitable bootstrapped business for 4 years before they decided to take a 100 million dollar investment and start bleeding money in pursuit of growth. Sourcehut is a profitable business even without requiring payment yet. The business model is not the problem. Network effects are.

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