Dozens of other companies followed Amazon's strategy and went bankrupt. Plus Amazon had an easy way to monetize traffic. Traffic alone isn't worth anything unle

Dozens of other companies followed Amazon's strategy and went bankrupt. Plus Amazon had an easy way to monetize traffic. Traffic alone isn't worth anything unless you can wring more money out of your visitors than it costs to service their requests. Google's existing advertising business works despite the low value of traffic because Google is collecting their cut from a huge swath of the Internet, and because the one kind of traffic they own - search - is the most directly linked to actually buying things, and thus the most valuable. Youtube is almost the opposite - expensive to service and totally unrelated to monetizable actions.