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Comment by samspenc | Hacker News Reader

The mind-blowing thing about this I found out recently, is that analysts think that Youtube is still losing money, even after making $31.5 billion in revenue!

From 2015 "Some unnamed person at Google reportedly said that the site is "roughly break-even." https://www.cbsnews.com/news/4-reasons-youtube-still-doesnt-... which in turn quotes https://www.wsj.com/articles/viewers-dont-add-up-to-profit-f...

From March this year (2024): "Analyst Michael Nathanson of MoffettNathanson estimates that YouTube TV will become profitable this year" https://www.newscaststudio.com/2024/03/29/youtube-tv-profit-...

Part of this could be because they pay out roughly 40-60% of the revenue to the content creators, that leaves Google / Youtube with half the revenue that they use to pay salaries, maintain infrastructure, including storage, hosting and serving content.

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YouTube TV !== YouTube

YTTV is their "cable" product

Netflix spends over 50% of it's revenue on content production and licensing ($17B out of $30B), and they made $6B net profit in the past year.

Netflix doesn't need to subsidize anything. YouTube subsidizes a lot of videos which don't have ads.

Netflix serves a slightly larger portion of internet traffic than YouTube on the same amount of revenue. So whatever subsidization youtube is providing for those videos, is clearly outweighed by the monetization of the remaining videos. YouTube has higher revenue per GB of bandwidth served than Netflix.

Do you have a source for that? I am surprised that Netflix would be bigger than YouTube.

> Do you have a source for that? I am surprised that Netflix would be bigger than YouTube.

Sandvine is the usual source in the industry and they say: "Sandvine's 2023 Global Internet Phenomena Report Shows 24% Jump in Video Traffic, with Netflix Volume Overtaking YouTube"

https://www.sandvine.com/press-releases/sandvines-2023-globa...

I wonder whether Netflix has a lot less content to cache, so they can push much more to edges.

Netflix technically doesn't serve anything that isn't monetized YouTube does, and to some degree non-monetizable content skews the numbers Also, due to the nature of YouTube a large amount of content is repeated but still taking storage

Netflix needs (1) a copy of say Top Gun Maverick (And maybe variations for different resolutions), YouTube needs a bazillion Copies of it with small variations, clips with different music, people "commenting" on it, people actually making commentary, Highlights, YTP's, etc all of it with a wider range of resolutions and also to way more people, plus the overhead of checking against their master copy of copyright infringement

Netflix needs less storage than YT, because not everyone can upload to Netflix. This also makes edge caching easier.

Of course it's break-even if you don't want to pay taxes but prefer to pay employees more instead. Sure maybe Youtube itself is break-even but how many people inside it become rich?

Youtube TV is their cable replacement, not related to the website at all really.

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