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Comment by Analemma_ | Hacker News Reader

It’s even worse than you think, because by all accounts YouTube is absurdly expensive to operate. Some even claim to that this day it has still never turned a profit for Google. And if Google can’t make it work— with their own ad network, tons of their own fiber, their own operating system, etc.— it’s likely that nobody can. Hosting unlimited video for free is just stupefyingly expensive.

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First, this is just a pervasive myth. Not that Google doesn’t operate money losing services: Blogger is a good example of that.

Second, “if Google can’t make it work no one can” is also a myth. YouTube, even the idea of which came after Google video was already launched, is a good example of that.

And, of course, Google+…

I’m absolutely talking out of my ass but I don’t think YouTube the company was profitable before the Google acquisition and I was under the impression that the increased aggressiveness about ads (displaying and preventing adblock) and the resulting YouTube premium push was a drive towards getting the YouTube subproject to be profitable.

It’s not impossible to make a video streaming platform profitable, but it definitely is hard and it likely isn’t possible with arbitrary unlimited free uploads.

Hosting costs are only going down. Now with nuclear energy costs will continue dropping as well. Google doesn't break out costs but their last earnings report yesterday had YouTube revenue at $9.79 billion for the quarter. I find it hard to believe that it's not profitable.

"one billion hours of videos every day." according to Wiki.

So 9.79/365*4 = 11 cents per hour of video.

I dunno what you need to profit from 1h of video.

I was at a talk recently where a person from an ad supported streaming provider broke down their cost/revenue as part of the justification for some of their engineering decisions.

Basically you're lucky to get ad revenue of 10c per hour.

Exactly. Also, people keep forgetting that Youtube doesn't just make money from ads. They also continue to introduce new revenue generating features such as the recent tips model.

It's speculated that YT wasn't profitable long after Google acquired it as well, it's still unclear as to if stand-alone it would be profitable, without the infrastructure benefits of being part of Google.

As a guy who builds big streaming services, I can definitely say profitability is a very hard thing to achieve. Even as compute costs go down, demand for features goes up and long-tail archive costs mount.

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