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Comment by EfficientDude | Hacker News Reader

Just to be clear - no video streaming site or service has been profitable in the long run, not yet anyway.

Netflix is very profitable. Its net income for 2022 was $4.4 billion; for 2023 it was $5.4 billion; and in 2024 it was $8.7 billion. For more information, go to https://ir.netflix.net/financials/quarterly-earnings/default... . The 2024 Q4 earning announcement has a spread sheet with Netflix's financial results for the last 3 years.

I imagine they meant user content video streaming sites.

Is that profit? Income isn't profit.

Are there any numbers on YouTube? While I don't doubt their costs are orders of magnitude bigger that other services, they also operate at a different scale operate as a defacto music service (I'm not talking about YT Music), and have the largest pool of ads to serve

iirc they turned a profit one quarter a few years ago but are otherwise a loss leader for Googles as business

YouTube profits aren't broken out separately. However, Google's quarterly and annual reports do give Youtube Ad revenues, which were $36bn in fiscal 2024. That Youtube is not profitable is quite the strong claim.....

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204425...

Technically nothing what you said disputes the claim.

You're jumping to the assumption that surely YouTube's costs have to be lower than $36B, and that is not at all assured. They handle an absolutely gargantuan amount of network data transfer, not to mention processing compute. I'm ignoring the storage but even that at their scale is probably at least 1B.

Vimeo, a terrible business, has been profitable for seven straight quarters.

"From Q4 2023 to Q3 2024, YouTube's combined revenue from advertising and subscriptions exceeded $50 billion."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube#cite_note-13

YouTube has been making a few billion dollars a year in profit for a while now.

Yes, network and compute is expensive, but when you are the size of Google the economics look a little different.

>YouTube has been making a few billion dollars a year in profit for a while now.

Are you insider, or have access to leaks I'm not aware of? YouTube profits are not public information (they are not broken down in the public fillings) so how can you say that confidently?

I'm not going to dox myself, but it is pretty clear that unless YT is extremely inefficient (by Google standards), it's making money:

https://mannhowie.com/youtube-valuation

Think about it another way: Google would be only too happy to kill the site if it wasn't making money.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34268536

In addition to the loss leader aspect it has for their other business units, what about more traditional expenses? Directly serving ads aside, all the user behavioral and popular trend data has to be hugely valuable in its own right. Plus all that ML training data would have cost them something if they hadn't already had it sitting on their servers.

It seems like you just have to be sufficiently large before you can successfully monetize a video platform.

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