Well, sure. Their business model is ridiculously perverse and as soon as they temper it with some reality all the money goes away. Alphabet hasn't published financials on Youtube since 2008. At the time, they were losing a half million dollars a year. That's back when they were pulling in $750m a year - they're at $15b now. So. Was Youtube a crazy moneywaster 10 years ago and now it's profitable as hell? Or are they losing $7b a year? After all, Alphabet has $105b in operating expenses. Youtube would hide pretty easily. But YouTube has not put in place the one change that researchers say would prevent this from happening again: turning off its recommendation system on videos of children, though the platform can identify such videos automatically. The company said that because recommendations are the biggest traffic driver, removing them would hurt “creators” who rely on those clicks.
