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If Youtube was profitable I think Google would have broke out its earning. If it isn't profitable now how is it going to profitable in the future and if it is h

If Youtube was profitable I think Google would have broke out its earning. If it isn't profitable now how is it going to profitable in the future and if it is how profitable will it be? Will it have have 90% margins? Same with netflix. These aren't software companies they are television companies, but with software company like valuations.

londons_explore 6y ago
YouTube's costs are rather entangled with the rest of googles costs. You could hire many different accountants and either find it to be very profitable or deeply loss making depending how much you value YouTube's use of Googles CDN's, network, and infrastructure. It's far more expensive to deliver YouTube video content than it is to deliver say Netflix where the library is tiny and very cacheable in comparison. Having said that, YouTube could quickly pivot to profitability if they simply said "any video that gets less than 1000 views a day will be deleted". And if they could suppress the inevitable user revolt...
- samfisher83 6y ago
  Most their costs are not cdn or video delivery. Its paying content creators.
  - chii 6y ago
    > Most their costs are not cdn or video delivery. Its paying content creators. if you're talking about youtube here (it's not clear from your context), youtube is paying content creators with 55% of revenue from an ad (since YT takes a 45% cut). But YT only pays out when there's some $100 dollars of accumulated revenue for the content creator - hence there's also some arbitrage interest income that YT gets to earn 100%.
- meibo 6y ago
  If they would do what you say in your last paragraph, they would be cutting off new creators coming to the platform, which would be incredibly stupid since a lot of small time creators that make great content and wouldn't otherwise still make it big on YouTube. Hiring people to do content instead couldn't replace that and hosting costs for small videos are not the biggest factor, I'm pretty sure.

londons_explore 6y ago

YouTube's costs are rather entangled with the rest of googles costs. You could hire many different accountants and either find it to be very profitable or deeply loss making depending how much you value YouTube's use of Googles CDN's, network, and infrastructure. It's far more expensive to deliver YouTube video content than it is to deliver say Netflix where the library is tiny and very cacheable in comparison. Having said that, YouTube could quickly pivot to profitability if they simply said "any video that gets less than 1000 views a day will be deleted". And if they could suppress the inevitable user revolt...

samfisher83 6y ago
Most their costs are not cdn or video delivery. Its paying content creators.
- chii 6y ago
  > Most their costs are not cdn or video delivery. Its paying content creators. if you're talking about youtube here (it's not clear from your context), youtube is paying content creators with 55% of revenue from an ad (since YT takes a 45% cut). But YT only pays out when there's some $100 dollars of accumulated revenue for the content creator - hence there's also some arbitrage interest income that YT gets to earn 100%.
meibo 6y ago
If they would do what you say in your last paragraph, they would be cutting off new creators coming to the platform, which would be incredibly stupid since a lot of small time creators that make great content and wouldn't otherwise still make it big on YouTube. Hiring people to do content instead couldn't replace that and hosting costs for small videos are not the biggest factor, I'm pretty sure.