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Comment by bushbaba | Hacker News Reader

It’s not that expensive at YouTube scale. We are talking fractions of a penny per GiB transferred.

"not that expensive" is relative; it's still a lot of money. Sure, it's not trillions of dollars, but it's still billions of dollars. YouTube has historically not returned a net profit (and I haven't heard of that situation changing).

Do you have a public source for that? From what I’ve heard YouTube has been profitable year years at this point.

> Do you have a public source for that?

YT financials and P&L were not broken out in audited financial statements back in the day.

Still aren’t. Alphabet only publishes YouTube revenue.

... and therefore, saying they're "profitable" is meaningless.

Allocating costs for things from Google that they use (e.g. the Ads system) is difficult. The problem with any subsidiary.

Yt basically got unusable without premium though.

I have premium, my wife accepts all of those ads

Still on Ublck Origin and I don't see any ads and all the videos.

I did that for a while and then even just hearing my wife suffer through it made me upgrade to the family plan. Now I invited some other family members and we are all enjoying that premium bitrate no-ad lifestyle.

I have uBlock Origin.

That doesn't work on my LG tv

Skill issue.

PiHole if the LG TV is an invariant. Otherwise, I believe casting from your ad blocked device should make the TV itself ad-free (Though for YT, "casting" may in face just be "using the app").

It's impossible for me to watch without premium too

> YouTube has historically not returned a net profit (and I haven't heard of that situation changing).

I'm sure that's what Google's accountants would love us (and the IRS) to continue to believe.

Not sure, one could say they use their dominant search position and revenue to serve video at a loss and distort the market, making it very hard for anyone without an existing money printing machine to bootstrap a profitable video site. See vimeo.

that was my assumption when i read they weren't profitable

and also that streaming and storing video at that scale is almost a natural monopoly, with how much it must cost and how hard it would be to compete without existing resources

Infrastructure at scale is not as expensive as cloud vendors would have you think. Reaching scale and being a first-mover gives a significant advantage, because deploying a CDN with caches well connected with(in) every major ISP around the world takes time.

The important question is how much can an ISP charge for a broadband without YouTube and Netflix service. They do not pay even the fractions of a penny everyone else has to.

Yeah, YouTube is big enough to put their own cache nodes directly in ISP datacenters

Yup! This is the reason why its so cheap for them. Other companies in similar positions have cache nodes in the ISPs and this dramatically lowers the cost

Which would help for the crazy popular meme videos, but I bet the long tail on YouTube is insanely big, even if you did have the “watch next” engine getting in on the game steering you toward content already present in your nearby caches.

YouTube is estimated to have 1 exabyte [1] of data. Petabyte level storage is not unheard of [2], and a gateway server with 5PB storage would cover ~0.5% of all YouTube videos, which should be sufficient to serve a very high percentage of the most popular videos.

They can still afford to serve the occasional obscure video from the origin servers.

[1] https://www.qqtube.com/blog/how-much-storage-does-youtube-ha...

[2] https://www.qnap.com/solution/petabyte-storage/en/

Bingo, and also in Internet Exchanges - every ISP at KCIX the exchange has direct handoff to YouTube, Google, NetFlix, Cloudflare, ...

Next iteration of this will be video generated on demand with GenAI running closer to the request, ideally at the request.

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