I've heard the line they're right on the edge of profitability but I've never gotten any real confirmation. I was younger when I heard that and I always though

I've heard the line they're right on the edge of profitability but I've never gotten any real confirmation. I was younger when I heard that and I always though youtube was just a cash cow. But think of how much servers (huge streaming metrics for each person watch + encoding servers), bandwidth and CDN must cost them. Ever with their own cloud, that has got to be huge. I worked at Amazon Instant Video and our CDN bills made my eyeballs pop out like I was a loony toon character. Traditionally they've only made money video advertising but I'm just not sure thats a great business model for video anymore. And, also throw in live streaming that people have been using, especially during covid, which is also free, and you have even more load they pay for free. An idea I always had was embedding a big zip or something into the mp4 format and uploading it for storage. Would they save the original files for download or would they be encoded to a lower bit rate and make them unusual. Maybe data encoded in an audio track would be better? Sounds like more than a weekend of experimenting but would be a cool little project.