> The problem really is that there's not enough revenue generated, to pay people producing the content.
> Even youtube is run at a loss (only offset by the valuable data they collect for google i suppose).
YouTube generates $15B in revenue. [1] I'm sure in the early years when they first acquired YouTube, they ran it at a loss. However, as far as I am aware, Google has never stated whether or not YouTube is profitable. Given the amount of revenue YouTube generates in the present day, I would say it's unlikely they are running YouTube at a loss.
if youtube was running at a profit, i would have expected alphabet's financial reports to jump at pointing it out.
They have never done so, and odds are that it looks really bad from a financial reporting perspective, even tho the user data it can collect is very valuable (but it cannot count as revenue, since there's no marketable value for such data atm).
It is fairly unlikely YouTube makes significant profits. It's costs are enormous.
More importantly, even if it were profitable now, it took literally hundreds of billions of investment to get there, and huge subsidy by Google's server infrastructure. Where is this public YouTube going to get an amount of money literally bigger than Nasa's funding from?
> Even youtube is run at a loss (only offset by the valuable data they collect for google i suppose).
YouTube generates $15B in revenue. [1] I'm sure in the early years when they first acquired YouTube, they ran it at a loss. However, as far as I am aware, Google has never stated whether or not YouTube is profitable. Given the amount of revenue YouTube generates in the present day, I would say it's unlikely they are running YouTube at a loss.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-al...