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Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

>Based on the money they are pulling in, they could easily put fewer, less intrusive ads on the platform and still make a healthy profit.

Not disagreeing/agreeing with you but just want to point out that Alphabet Inc only publicizes Youtube's revenue and not the profit in their financial reports. So we as outsiders really can't say with 100% certainty whether Youtube is still losing money, or break-even, or profitable.

And if they are profitable this year (or recent years), does it make up for all the accumulated losses over multiple years since they acquired it in 2006? We don't have the raw internal numbers to calculate that.

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Also I think it’s fair to say most people have absolutely no idea how much video gets uploaded to YouTube every day and how much it costs to host and serve all that video.

The best number I could find is that over 500 hours of video are uploaded every minute. That’s 720,000 hours of video uploaded per day or 263 million hours per year.

At a modest estimate of around 1.5GB/hour for 1080p video (I think this is a very low estimate, since YouTube has much higher quality available now, and also stores different versions of each video), this works out to 376PB per year!

Other factors to consider:

* Transcoding. YouTube servers are constantly transcoding video into many different formats, given a single input file.

* Serving. YouTube isn’t served from one central data centre. They operate a huge CDN in order to serve users at the edge of the network. This means some percentage of that 376PB figure must be duplicated many times across many different data centres.

> this works out to 376PB per year!

And Alphabet's 2022 net income works out to $59 billion. Let's not pretend that YT is some struggling startup that could be bankrupted by cloud costs at any moment.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOG/financials?p=GOOG

Are we forgetting that Google is the company that seems to kill more products than any other [1]? Just because they got bought by Google doesn’t mean YouTube gets a free ride with guaranteed support.

Back before the acquisition, YouTube was losing hundreds of millions of dollars. They were burning so much runway the company was essentially an all-in moonshot to get acquired by one of the big players (Google being the most likely buyer).

Since then, their costs have only grown and rather dramatically at that. They are far larger in terms of users and the videos far higher quality than they were back then.

So why do people continue expecting Google to subsidize YouTube and run it at a loss?

[1] https://killedbygoogle.com/

The make uploaders pay to keep their ad-free videos saved to the service. 1 penny per minute of saved video a year should do the trick.

A nickel per minute / month if they want to get greedy about it.

The vast majority of that video will never again be watched. If its just google footing the bill for it than I don't particularly care about it, but as soon as they start demanding that I pay out of pocket for it I would say they should first aggressively cull anything that is unlikely to be viewed. To the GPs point, I also don't care about the money they wasted growing their market share, and I'm certainly not interested in rewarding them for behaviour that destroyed their competition.

Culling that would probably throw together with the bathtub an entire trove of internet history...

What makes you think that?

I feel like the obvious starting point is to sort videos by whether they meet a view count threshold like 1000, and I would expect that to preserve internet history quite well.

I would love to see a breakdown of how many hours of video youtube is storing, sorted by how many digits the view count has.

How did it survive pre-aquisition?

They burned a lot of VC, getting market share until Google bought them and shutdown “Google Video”. They had some media deals but I don’t think they would have survived very long without the huge infrastructure support Google could offer.

What was the state of the art in terms of open source ad blockers at the time, do you know? Its seems like this is more of a recent thing, cracking down on adblockers

YouTube was founded in February 2005. Google acquired it in October 2006. It was an independent company for less than 2 years! It was growing at such a staggering pace that it was definitely going to die if it didn’t get bought soon!

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