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Google is making money hosting these videos, and users are freely uploading them. A competitor would have to scrape/download them, store them, process them all

Google is making money hosting these videos, and users are freely uploading them. A competitor would have to scrape/download them, store them, process them all at their own cost, along with having much less metadata available (Which videos are most viewed, which segments, what do people repeat, what do people skip, what do people watch after this video, which video generates the most ad revenue, etc.)

sofixa 1y ago
> Google is making money hosting these videos This isn't certain. Google do not break out Youtube revenues nor costs. Hosting this amount of videos, globally, redundantly, the vast majority of which are basically never watched, cannot be cheap. It's entirely plausible that Google's wider benefit from Youtube (such as training video generation algorithms and better behaviour tracking for better targeted ads across the internet) are enough to compensate for Youtube in particular losing money.
- 1024core 1y ago
  > Google do not break out Youtube revenues nor costs. Google does break out Youtube revenue. Latest 10-K: https://abc.xyz/assets/77/51/9841ad5c4fbe85b4440c47a4df8d/goog-10-k-2024.pdf https://abc.xyz/assets/77/51/9841ad5c4fbe85b4440c47a4df8d/go... See page 10, for youtube Ads revenue.
  - sofixa 1y ago
    My bad, I thought it's the two. But they don't break out costs, so in reality we don't know if YouTube is profitable or not.