It is YouTube's problem to make their business profitable. And hence they will make efforts like what the article says. If things don't work they might require login and enforce ads somehow (YouTube will survive that I think, even if there is some viewership drop). There is no magic wand here that they can figure out (look at competing video services like Vimeo for an example). In the long run in 20 years if YouTube is deemed unprofitable as a whole for the company, it might even be shut down, and nobody might be willing to host another YouTube like service as is without significant changes to monetisation.

I guess I'm fine with that! Or maybe some billionaire will make it it's gift to humanity. Crazy that we have public libraries but no public youtube/wiki government supported

YouTube costs a lot, and even that because it can rely on Google's amazing infrastructure which is optimised to the core. There is no billionaire who can even cover 10 years of YouTube costs.

Was looking for numbers on it, heres one :https://www.businessofapps.com/data/youtube-statistics/

I think they're doing pretty great!

YouTube is very profitable

Source?

Revenue != profits

I'm sorry, in two years they upped their revenue by over 10b - from 19 to 28b - I'm fairly certain they are having record profits.

You don't spend the kind of money staffing a product like YouTube unless there are lots of profits too.

Everyone seems to have read an article from 10+ years ago and haven't updated their opinion since. The internet is wildly different now. Tech makes huge profits.

Absolutely! I find it nuts to see so many people defending giant corporations - it's so backwards.

Please don’t ask for sources on publicly available information, as if it’s my responsibility to personally convince you of it.

It's not public. We only know revenues. So you should back up your claims with sources.

>Edit: And I'm suprised few people are mentionning how much information youtube gets about you from using the site, and using youtube premium makes being anonymous impossible.

This is an important point. How much money is Google making by being able to track and spy on YouTube viewers?

YouTube’s unit economics are fairly unique in that monetisation rates put a ceiling on video quality.

Even with the best networks and infrastructure in the world, they would struggle to break even on 4K video with say $2 CPM. Obviously they exceed that threshold at the moment for 4K, but maybe not for 8K or 16k.