[jasode]

>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.

[mrkurt]

Oh you're right.YouTube probably couldn't have been profitable. They could have gone out of business, however.

Vimeo has reasonable unit margins, though, and has since the early days.

What I'm mostly irked about is that there was no room for experimentation. YouTube was impossible to compete with.

[scarface74]

“Unit margins” mean about as much as Ubers made up metric where it is profitable as long as you ignore a dozen expenses .