And what about the costs? I don't know how to find that for youtube, but here's netflix:

> Netflix operating expenses for the quarter ending March 31, 2020 were $4.809B, a 18.4% increase year-over-year.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NFLX/netflix/opera...

They're obviously not comparable directly like this, but just based on internet bandwidth usage, they're probably in the same ballpark, but netflix has a far, far easier technical problem. They have a relatively small library that can probably be cached easily. Imagine the infrastructure that is behind a youtube CDN.

That doesn't demonstrate that it turned a profit though. Video streaming is costly and they pay over 50% of that to creators.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/4/21121370/youtube-advertisi...

Maybe people should just pay for it?

Oh no. How could they make us pay for the software services. Imo, this mentality needs to go. People spend $$$ in cafe, buy expensive branded clothes, transportation, hanging out with their friends, outside food, and so on. All of those are not necessary but they pay for it. They should pay for the digital services they spend most of their time on now a days. What's different?

Everyone has the option for an ad-sponsored or ad-free YouTube for a monthly fee.

Which is how I've been watching YouTube, ad-free for years.

Except, they don't. People aren't willing to pay much for non-physical goods anymore.

/me looks at my Patreon bill

Yeah, no. The problem is Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is garbage, and people don't like to pay for something that is mostly garbage.

If there are no free services subsidized by google or other tech corp, then they will have to pay or shut up.

> People aren't willing to pay much for non-physical goods anymore.

Anecdotal

And guess who's fault is that ?

I pay for Youtube premium, I see no ads, it's amazing...

What is your point here? You want Youtube to be like a cable television company and make money off ads and subscribers?

How does this relate to YouTubes 5BN in revenue?

or we could all move to something decentralized like peertube. It doesn't need to all be hosted by one company.

That doesn't tell us how profitable it is. It might very well be spending more on infrastructure and networking than it gets in revenue. For comparison, Netflix's cost of revenue was 3.6 billion dollars last quarter.

Revenue is not profit.

Sure, but how much did that $5B cost?