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by deanCommie 486 days ago
Technically nothing what you said disputes the claim.

You're jumping to the assumption that surely YouTube's costs have to be lower than $36B, and that is not at all assured. They handle an absolutely gargantuan amount of network data transfer, not to mention processing compute. I'm ignoring the storage but even that at their scale is probably at least 1B.
3 comments
badlibrarian 486 days ago
Vimeo, a terrible business, has been profitable for seven straight quarters.

"From Q4 2023 to Q3 2024, YouTube's combined revenue from advertising and subscriptions exceeded $50 billion."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube#cite_note-13

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SR2Z 486 days ago
YouTube has been making a few billion dollars a year in profit for a while now.

Yes, network and compute is expensive, but when you are the size of Google the economics look a little different.

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poincaredisk 486 days ago
>YouTube has been making a few billion dollars a year in profit for a while now.

Are you insider, or have access to leaks I'm not aware of? YouTube profits are not public information (they are not broken down in the public fillings) so how can you say that confidently?

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SR2Z 485 days ago
I'm not going to dox myself, but it is pretty clear that unless YT is extremely inefficient (by Google standards), it's making money:

https://mannhowie.com/youtube-valuation

Think about it another way: Google would be only too happy to kill the site if it wasn't making money.

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bob_theslob646 486 days ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34268536
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