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Fuck YT, but bad meme. YouTube has never been profitable
I doubt that. Paper losses are not an indicator of profitability.
It's not hard to look up the earnings
I did. They reported $31.5 Billion in revenue for 2023.
Im not finding any concrete report on their expenses, but I did find some best guesses as speculated by users. This reddit thread from 7 years ago, is estimating about $2 billion in expenses.
Let's assume that since this was 7 years ago things have gotten drastically more expensive for YouTube, and throw an additional buffer on top of that since we can't be 100% sure. Let's pentuple their proposed operating costs, and, hell, let's also be VERY generous and say that they keep a work force of 5,000 people who each make.. Let's say $120,000/yr?
That would come out to about $10.6 billion/yr in business expenses. Even if you factor in the payments to top earning YouTubers, those only measure in the 10s of millions... Okay.. Let's be reeeeal generous to YouTube here and assume that this guy from r/theydidthemath 7 years ago was WAY off. Let's assume he was off by half of YouTubers actual expenses. Following our (absolutely ludicrous) estimates of their expenses going up by a factor of 5 and their 5,000 employees averaging out to $120,000/yr salaries; YouTube would still be reporting under $21 billion a year in expenses. That means they are net profit $10 billion a year even with the insanely expensive operating costs we assigned them here.
$10 billion. Let me put that into perspective. 10 million seconds is about 115 days. So 10 million seconds in the past was just about the new Year. 10 billion seconds however was 317 years ago.
This idea that YouTube isn't profitable is equal parts ridiculous and hilarious. I just sat here for 15 minutes waxing accountant at you, but none of that was even necessary. YouTube is a business (technically it's Google but you get the point), if it wasn't profitable, it wouldn't exist. Period.
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, but that estimate could have been wrong by a factor of 10 easily. The idea of an "average video" being 50MB, for example, is questionable: at typical bitrates of 1080p videos this would amount to about a minute-long video. I don't think that's an average video at all. It also doesn't account for many things, for example the cost of replicating new videos to the CDN.
I also don't find the idea of YouTube not being profitable ridiculous or hilarious. YouTube definitely wasn't profitable before monetisation, and Google used to run it for prestige and data collection purposes at a financial loss. They clearly have been trying to make it more profitable, but whether or not they have crossed the break-even point in the past or are still hoping to cross it in the future is not as clear to me as it is to you.