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Comment by kfarr | Hacker News Reader

Bingo, YT has always been a loss leader for Google dominance. Only recently have they squeezed the ads knob to maybe generate a profit but I’d bet it’s nothing like the high margin AdWords cash cow.

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It's rather interesting that there is the possibility that you can't actually run a good, for profit streaming service, based on ads. The current iteration of the YouTube recommendation seems to suggest that you have to at least remove the "good" part of the equation. You're also correct in that they squeezed the ad knob, but I fear that they squeezed it to much. YouTube is unusable without ad blocking or YouTube Premium.

The cost of YouTube Music is $11 and YouTube Premium, which include Music is $14. To me that indicates that you can run YouTube for a given user for around $3 - $5 per month. Trying to watch YouTube with ads, the shear amount of ads and the length, could be a sign that ads on YouTube is almost worthless, at least they seem to struggle to get $5 per user per month.

YouTube isn't going to die at the hands of competitors anytime soon though, because the cost will deter anyone interested.

YouTube Music is just a reskinned YouTube client using the same catalog, playlists, history, likes, etc as YouTube itself. I wouldn't put much into costs based on that price.

There's nothing in the world like the AdWords cash cow. They're a one-trick pony, but it's a really good trick.

Content ads: not nearly as much.

Visa and Verisign are comparable cash cows:

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/V/visa/profit-marg...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/VRSN/verisign/prof...

Epic electronic health records software is not a publicly listed company, but I would guess they have massive profit margins too.

As long as we’re talking about epic: is it an exclusively self hosted product? I don’t understand how it’s so susceptible to ransomeware compared to nearly every other cloud platform. You never hear about someone’s salesforce being ransomwared or their servicenow being held hostage, but it feels like we can’t go a month without another hospital going offline.

As I understand, Epic be hosted on-prem or in the cloud. Being in the cloud doesn't eliminate downtime risk from ransomware, though. Even if you treat each PC like a dumb terminal, you're still going to have downtime to replace or repair them when they no longer work.

> You never hear about someone’s salesforce being ransomwared or their servicenow being held hostage

You may hear about business organizations being unable to do work due to ransomware. Likely nobody mentions their inability to access salesforce specifically, because 1. the data in there usually isn't controlled and 2. likely nobody is going to die if they can't log into salesforce.

It's so wild to see people so confidently being wrong in a comment. YouTube has seen profit since 2013, with margins growing each year.

No. 2013? See GP, see Google financial statements, etc. I do think it started turning a profit over the last 3 years, but can't confirm that.

it's so wild to see people so confidently wrong. I was there. Were you?

I was there as well, and Youtube was wildly profitable.

See how easy it is to make random statements on the internet.

Do you have any source on that? Google has never released separate revenue/profit details for youtube.

Where is this shown in the 10-K or 10-Q filings?

http://abc.xyz/investor

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