YouTube took years and only became slightly profitable after burning through billions of Google’s money and then only by piggybacking off of Google’s existing infrastructure and ad network.
Price dumping is a bigger deal when it's a company in a monopoly position doing it. It's not necessarily anti competitive to sell at below cost.
YouTube could have been profitable by charging for their services. Like Vimeo. They could not have been profitable with ads. Google couldn't afford for YouTube to be small, they needed a near monopoly on internet video to extend their ad empire.
>YouTube could have been profitable by charging for their services. Like Vimeo.
Fyi, Vimeo was a money-losing business when IAC bought it 2006 and is still unprofitable after IAC spun it out as a public company in May 2021.
So it's not convincing that Youtube could have stayed independent and become profitable by charging for videos. Before the Google acquisition, Youtube was also threatened by the billion dollar Viacom lawsuit. The young Youtube startup didn't have the money to fight expensive legal battles like that and could realistically lose in court like Napster lost against the RIAA lawsuit.
Youtube getting acquired by Google got the video startup out of several fires: (1) switch to Google's datacenter infrastructure which reduces operating costs (2) tap into Google's extensive ad network to monetize (3) use Google's army of lawyers to settle with Viacom by convincing them that the ContentID fingerprinting algorithm will filter out piracy.