[Fej]

YouTube allows free video uploads and ingests an incredible amount of content every day. Most of that content won't make any money, or just pennies, and yet they're storing it for free. They're not running out of space.

In retrospect, it's not surprising that they're ending the unlimited free ride. Most (all?) of the major photo hosting sites ended their unlimited free plans ages ago. Clearly it is not sustainable from a business perspective.

(I am not referring to the meme sites like Imgur who host images at a far lower resolution with a far higher compression ratio, which is of course useless for photos.)

[jl6]

For all we know, YouTube may be haemorrhaging money and they just haven’t figured out a way of charging for storage - yet.

[Fej]

YouTube generates $15b in revenue on ads, plus YouTube Premium memberships [1] and so the cost of storing and serving all of the data would also have to total in the billions, after paying ad revenue to creators as well as other costs. That could be the case, although if they were taking a substantial loss it's unlikely they would hold on for as long as they have.

YouTube also has the benefit of having monopoly power over its market - to their credit, no one else, ever, has had a platform where an independent video creator could start with a handful of viewers and build up to millions. But since they have all of the creators already, and starting a competitor is extremely capital-intensive, there aren't any competitors at anything near their scale. For the most part the usual way to find other YouTube creators is YouTube, via their recommendation algorithm. There is a significant lock-in effect.

Since they have monopoly power, they should be able to find ways to monetize their platform, even if potentially contentious. They recently turned on mid-roll ads on all videos longer than 8 minutes (unless the creator opts out) [2] so it's not like they're out of ideas.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-al...

[2] https://9to5google.com/2020/07/10/youtube-mid-roll-ads-short...

[jl6]

I’m inclined to agree with you, but we simply don’t know because Google doesn’t report YouTube financials separately. They could still be taking a loss and subsidising it with general search revenue.

[user5994461]

YouTube is very profitable.

Historically, YouTube was acquired circa 2006, it was bleeding money massively and in constant legal battle with the music labels, until things started turning around circa 2010.