[jraby3]

Hosting costs are only going down. Now with nuclear energy costs will continue dropping as well. Google doesn't break out costs but their last earnings report yesterday had YouTube revenue at $9.79 billion for the quarter. I find it hard to believe that it's not profitable.

[Velorivox]

Exactly. Also, people keep forgetting that Youtube doesn't just make money from ads. They also continue to introduce new revenue generating features such as the recent tips model.

[rightbyte]

"one billion hours of videos every day." according to Wiki.

So 9.79/365*4 = 11 cents per hour of video.

I dunno what you need to profit from 1h of video.

[bobdvb]

I was at a talk recently where a person from an ad supported streaming provider broke down their cost/revenue as part of the justification for some of their engineering decisions.

Basically you're lucky to get ad revenue of 10c per hour.