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Twitter and YouTube don’t make profits, yet are still wildly successful. With a high enough amounts of hype, stock price, and money, a company can stave off rea

Twitter and YouTube don’t make profits, yet are still wildly successful. With a high enough amounts of hype, stock price, and money, a company can stave off reality in seeming perpetuity.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
hef19898 3y ago
Wasn't Twitter mostly profitable, except for some hugebsttlement with the FCC (?)? Until recently that is.
- fundad 3y ago
  [flagged]
- leetharris 3y ago
  Elon said that when he acquired Twitter it was burning $4 million per day.
  - detaro 3y ago
    Afaik the number was after the acquisition, and thus with Twitter on the hook for $1.2 billion of yearly debt repayment from the acquisition loans?
  - hef19898 3y ago
    If your source would have been Twitters SEC filings, I woupd believe it. By now, I wouldn't believe Elon tellong me it's raining while being soaked in rain, waiting for one the millions of Tesla's robot taxis to pick me up.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - qwytw 3y ago
    Their net income back in 2021 was -223.32 mil. So only ~0.6 million per day. The interest payments on the $12.5 billion of debt Musk offloading to its balance sheet to fund his 'purchase' is way more than that. Basically Musk alone costs Twitter about the same as 4000 - 8000 employees. Which is why he had to fire that many people.. Seems like a great deal. Not that I mind him running Twitter into the ground it's horrible format/platform for any meaningful communication aside from public single sentence public announcements..
    - Ensorceled 3y ago
      As always, you are (were) using Twitter wrong. I follow authors, artists and journalists. Now, since Musk, the comments on anything newsworthy is a cesspool of paid subscribers with inane comments or just a string of emojis. If you had told me 6 months ago that I would grow to hate the clown emoji, I would have been bewildered.
      - qwytw 3y ago
        > As always, you are (were) using Twitter wrong. I follow authors, artists and journalists. Well yeah, but those authors, artists and journalists can only use Twitter to share links and images (and announcements) since no meaningful content can fit into 230 chars. The worst is when people split a single paragraph text into 5+ tweets, that just brain damage inducing UX.... IMHO removing the limit would've been the only good thing Musk did if it was available to everyone.
      - theGnuMe 3y ago
        Science and likewise machine learning twitter are interesting in the game theory sense of the whatever Twitter is. Same with journalists. It's distinct from the influencer phenomenon. Also distinct from what you see in the author/podcast world.
bombcar 3y ago
I’m fully convinced that YouTube not making money is some sort of accounting trick utilizing the fact that it rents bandwidth and compute from Google.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  The only thing saving YouTube from going down under is that Google supplies it with bandwidth. Egress-dominated bandwidth is hella expensive, and video (especially if you're going 4K) demands tons of it. Netflix eases that problem by providing ISPs and other interested parties with racks full of what are essentially ultra-performant NAS systems [1] for free, but that's only realistic because the utter majority of Netflix's load comes from their top movies/series and it saves them all the egress fees and the ISPs a hefty chunk of their connectivity needs - ~15% of all Internet traffic is Netflix [2] and even serving a quarter of that by ISP-local caches takes off a lot of load. Youtube, Vimeo and their smaller competitors, in contrast, have way too much different content to make such an expense worth it. [1] https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/ https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/ [2] https://www.statista.com/chart/15692/distribution-of-global-downstream-traffic/ https://www.statista.com/chart/15692/distribution-of-global-...
  - bombcar 3y ago
    I’m not so sure that YouTube isn’t dominated by a small cacheable percentage of content. They could probably save significant bandwidth just by caching Baby Shark (and if they’re not, they’re missing something). Egress bandwidth is pretty cheap if you’re not paying a cloud provider for it.

Twitter and YouTube don’t make profits, yet are still wildly successful. With a high enough amounts of hype, stock price, and money, a company can stave off reality in seeming perpetuity.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

hef19898 3y ago

Wasn't Twitter mostly profitable, except for some hugebsttlement with the FCC (?)? Until recently that is.

fundad 3y ago
[flagged]
leetharris 3y ago
Elon said that when he acquired Twitter it was burning $4 million per day.
- detaro 3y ago
  Afaik the number was after the acquisition, and thus with Twitter on the hook for $1.2 billion of yearly debt repayment from the acquisition loans?
- hef19898 3y ago
  If your source would have been Twitters SEC filings, I woupd believe it. By now, I wouldn't believe Elon tellong me it's raining while being soaked in rain, waiting for one the millions of Tesla's robot taxis to pick me up.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- qwytw 3y ago
  Their net income back in 2021 was -223.32 mil. So only ~0.6 million per day. The interest payments on the $12.5 billion of debt Musk offloading to its balance sheet to fund his 'purchase' is way more than that. Basically Musk alone costs Twitter about the same as 4000 - 8000 employees. Which is why he had to fire that many people.. Seems like a great deal. Not that I mind him running Twitter into the ground it's horrible format/platform for any meaningful communication aside from public single sentence public announcements..
  - Ensorceled 3y ago
    As always, you are (were) using Twitter wrong. I follow authors, artists and journalists. Now, since Musk, the comments on anything newsworthy is a cesspool of paid subscribers with inane comments or just a string of emojis. If you had told me 6 months ago that I would grow to hate the clown emoji, I would have been bewildered.
    - qwytw 3y ago
      > As always, you are (were) using Twitter wrong. I follow authors, artists and journalists. Well yeah, but those authors, artists and journalists can only use Twitter to share links and images (and announcements) since no meaningful content can fit into 230 chars. The worst is when people split a single paragraph text into 5+ tweets, that just brain damage inducing UX.... IMHO removing the limit would've been the only good thing Musk did if it was available to everyone.
    - theGnuMe 3y ago
      Science and likewise machine learning twitter are interesting in the game theory sense of the whatever Twitter is. Same with journalists. It's distinct from the influencer phenomenon. Also distinct from what you see in the author/podcast world.

bombcar 3y ago

I’m fully convinced that YouTube not making money is some sort of accounting trick utilizing the fact that it rents bandwidth and compute from Google.

mschuster91 3y ago
The only thing saving YouTube from going down under is that Google supplies it with bandwidth. Egress-dominated bandwidth is hella expensive, and video (especially if you're going 4K) demands tons of it. Netflix eases that problem by providing ISPs and other interested parties with racks full of what are essentially ultra-performant NAS systems [1] for free, but that's only realistic because the utter majority of Netflix's load comes from their top movies/series and it saves them all the egress fees and the ISPs a hefty chunk of their connectivity needs - ~15% of all Internet traffic is Netflix [2] and even serving a quarter of that by ISP-local caches takes off a lot of load. Youtube, Vimeo and their smaller competitors, in contrast, have way too much different content to make such an expense worth it. [1] https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/ https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/ [2] https://www.statista.com/chart/15692/distribution-of-global-downstream-traffic/ https://www.statista.com/chart/15692/distribution-of-global-...
- bombcar 3y ago
  I’m not so sure that YouTube isn’t dominated by a small cacheable percentage of content. They could probably save significant bandwidth just by caching Baby Shark (and if they’re not, they’re missing something). Egress bandwidth is pretty cheap if you’re not paying a cloud provider for it.