YouTube is an incredibly popular website. More than likely, you and all of your friends use it. Hell, perhaps everyone you know visits the website on a frequent basis. You would think that the website, given it’s immense popularity, would be a huge money maker, right? Wrong.
Estimates vary, but the general consensus among analytics outlets suggests that YouTube (which was purchased by Google in November of 2006) is still running at a financial loss to this day. It is estimated that YouTube is costing Google approximately $1 million daily (yes, that’s per day!). Google’s only making money from about 14 percent of the one billion video views every day.
The operation is massively expensive. It costs a whole lot of money to keep YouTube’s systems up and running, and even more to supply bandwidth.
Twenty-four hours of video is uploaded every sixty seconds to the website. That means that approximately four years of video is uploaded every single day. Let that be evidence that YouTube is an expensive operation.
Google knows what they’re doing, however. The company is consistently experimenting with new money-making techniques. And while we don’t exactly have the insider information as to what their next big “moolah” move will be, hopefully they’ll be able to come up with a great idea that doesn’t involve over-commercializing the service.
via Erictric
