[Judgmentality]

Ooh, this is something I've often wondered (and has become more interesting since Alphabet recently started revealing revenue numbers for YouTube) - can YouTube be profitable as a standalone entity?

The reason I ask is because, despite all its flaws, YouTube is one of the treasures of the internet. And I wonder if we'd lose it by breaking up Alphabet.

I am not pro-Alphabet and 100% believe Alphabet needs more regulation, and quite frankly does need some trust busting, but I'd be really sad to lose YouTube. Yeah, there's vimeo but it's clearly not a direct competitor. I also fondly remember stage6 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stage6).

[kevincox]

I would bet it could. YouTube definitely benefits from Google infrastructure. Especially since a lot of their cost is video transcoding and batch pipelines which can easily be slotted into unused CPU around the world. YouTube almost certainly also gets very cheap storage not only because Google has optimized storage cost for them but also because of the similar flexibility that they have on where videos are stored. Furthermore they use Google's CDN which is likely the best in the world hand has many relationships with ISPs to get caches close to eyeballs.

However as I understand it the product itself isn't tied to the Google infrastructure. YouTube's main value is the user base, both of viewers and of publishers. It would be a technical marvel to move it off of Google's infrastructure however I don't think that there is any feature that they wouldn't be able to provide anymore. It would certainly be more expensive, but at YouTube's size you could probably work out similar deals with other providers (or with GCP) so I'm not sure that the prices would rise that much. (IDK, maybe 15% increase in cost between provider cut and raw cost increase?)