[usef-]

It also didn't generate billions in income before even adding ads^1, nor grow anywhere near as quickly. ChatGPT is larger on most axes.

YouTube was ambitious for its time. "In 2007, YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet had in 2000" but they weren't believed to start breaking even until 2015.

^1 and free users are a large majority!

[hansmayer]

Whether it "generated billions" is a wrong angle to look at this. What is relevant is the relation between the spend, or the committed spend and the income. I don´t believe that YT at any point committed to investing literally 1000x of its yearly revenue into a partner company, nor do I remember its CEO using made up words such as "annualised revenue" that keep being spat out by both OpenAI and Antropic CEOs, in the sense of "projecting the max monthly revenue as annual and fooling the investors".