This has been a point of discussion for nearly a decade. It’s almost common knowledge YouTube runs at a loss. CDN hosting was approximated to be about 2 billion in 2017, not including what they pay to creators, employees, etc. Their revenue does not cover all of these expenses, meaning there are no profits to announce. They borrow money from their parent company, Alphabet, because they benefit from YouTube by it merely existing under their control. They have an effective monopoly on video hosting and zero meaningful competition.
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baru@lemmy.world 6 months agoYouTube has been running on a loss
Can you look to that? They only seem to share revenue, not profit. And profit is easily manipulated. Apparently they had 29 billion USD in revenue in 2023. There was a huge growth in revenue. I don’t see why you really claim that they’re making a loss.
RealFknNito@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Frost752@lemmy.world 6 months ago
First of all, a link to reddit isnt an acceptable source. Second if it was common knowledge that YouTube ran at a loss I would think looking up “does YouTube run at a loss” would give something more recent then 2009 abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=7868311&page=1 I did find this from 2016, by looking for “YouTube revenue report” and according to this YouTube generated 31bn USD in 2023, unfortunately I can’t find any concrete numbers for operating costs but some estimates I read were between a couple hundred mil to a few bn, either way drops in the bucket compared to profits. Sure YouTube may have operated at a loss at first but its highly unlikely it still is.
RealFknNito@lemmy.world 6 months ago
First of all, the link to Reddit had their own links but hey, fuck trying to find a source. Second, you’re looking for decade old information as if it were brand new, not really how SEO works but hey.
YouTube doesn’t report their expenses. We have to guess. The one time they did revealed they operate at a loss which is why in the fucking Reddit post I showed you, they were discussing said losses. But hey, not an acceptable source. Christ.
baru@lemmy.world 6 months ago
YouTube doesn’t report their expenses.
But you said they aren’t making a profit. And you could see their revenue heavily increased in the last few years. So something has to give.
Frost752@lemmy.world 6 months ago
A reddit post from 8 years ago is not going to have up to date information so no, not a valid source, but even in that reddit post many people point out that youtube was breaking even in 2014 not operating at a loss. I did read the reddit post and the sources they provide require subscriptions to access. This will be the last I respond to this though since I can’t see this going anywhere, continuing the conversation would be asinine.
Frost752@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I did find some statistics about YT running at a loss back in 09 but I can’t find anything recent really abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=7868311&page=1