Facebook was a good example. They avoided excessive advertising in their growth phase, effectively spending potential profit for a huge user base. Critically, the profit was intangible as was the investment as the IRS does not care about money you never collected or the number of users you have only cash.
YouTube is another, as far as we can tell it’s currently extremely profitable yet people looking at their financials where laughing at the sale price when Google Snatched it up. Part of this is from ever more advertising coupled with ever lower bandwidth costs.
> YouTube is another, as far as we can tell it’s currently extremely profitable
Anecdotally, the fact that YouTube is flooding their channels with more and more advertisements would seem to indicate that they are NOT profitable at all.
I now loathe YouTube links and highly encourage people to try to put their video content anywhere else (even their own webpage--hosting is a lot cheaper now).
google derives much more value from youtube's viewership data than the profit in ads it makes imho.
Youtube's profit model is only profitable at google scale - imagine the capital expenditure to build out such a large video platform (not very many other tech giants have been able to build video, and have it be free).
Retric|6 years ago
YouTube is another, as far as we can tell it’s currently extremely profitable yet people looking at their financials where laughing at the sale price when Google Snatched it up. Part of this is from ever more advertising coupled with ever lower bandwidth costs.
bsder|6 years ago
Anecdotally, the fact that YouTube is flooding their channels with more and more advertisements would seem to indicate that they are NOT profitable at all.
I now loathe YouTube links and highly encourage people to try to put their video content anywhere else (even their own webpage--hosting is a lot cheaper now).
chii|6 years ago
Youtube's profit model is only profitable at google scale - imagine the capital expenditure to build out such a large video platform (not very many other tech giants have been able to build video, and have it be free).
countryqt30|6 years ago