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Youtube premium also pays out the content creators you watch in lieu of the ads you don't watch does it not? At least that was my understanding.

If so it's not just the infrastructure cost which itself is not trivial for a site like youtube.

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Infrastructure costs are such that they're a rounding error on the total google budget.

With all respect, do you have a source for that? I thought Alphabet was losing money hand over fist on YT before they started being so aggressive with the ads.

Let's for the moment assume that you are right, then they shouldn't have bought it in ... 2006, all of 17 years ago. And if they are short of money why are they pushing more and more junk on people? Let's start with switching off autoplay by default, limiting videos to 640x480, and offering creators to pay for the hosting so that their video can be shipped, just like I pay for the hosting of my web servers.

Their whole position is horribly inconsistent.

Were they losing or weren't they making enough to satisfy their greed?

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