[joering2]

Is the business even profitable? They claim youtube made $5 billion in revenue ads last 3 months but they don’t provide net numbers. Their typical text ad weights approx 250 kb in size (including all JS junk) and ther profit margin is “only” 23%. I doubt pushing 4k content for 15 minutes and serving one 15 cents ad puts them in green.

[nl]

Google has backbone peering agreements because they bought huge amounts of fibre in the 2001 and 2008 crashes.

They don't really pay for bandwidth in the way you are thinking about it.

[throwaway2048]

Use Youtube without an adblocker, they have a lot more than just simple text ads. Also, bandwidth is essentially free for Google beyond capital costs due to the fact they are peered with practically every ISP on earth (traceroute Google.com).

[d1zzy]

If it was "free" then everyone could do it. The fact that very few people have the capability to provide the connectivity Google provides points to the contrary.

[throwaway2048]

I never said building the connectivity was free, In fact I said the opposite.