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Youtube isn't really known to be highly profitable. I'm also not sure people would go to a Facebook YouTube when the normal YouTube exists

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Brother, YouTube is quite literally a money printing machine. I don’t know where you’re getting information from.

YouTube has a lot of revenue, profit isn't known as far as I'm aware. Alphabet doesn't report YouTube earnings separately, and when they were still sharing that information it was a pretty large amount of losses IIRC. But if you have sources I'm happy to change my mind

They report YT's earnings, iirc it is about 60B (40B ads + 20B subs) annually, with 10% YoY growth. They don't disclose youtube's profits outside of Google Services (which has ~40% margins), so yes youtube is a money printing machine.

And for a long time (pre-AI) youtube was the biggest load on Google's entire infra. The number i recall was ~30% of all Google's cpu utilization was for youtube, and google spent a lot of effort optimizing it.

Thanks, I will look into it, my mental model is outdated of what you say is true

When people talk about breaking Google up… YT has always seemed an obvious candidate for separation

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