- Sep 17, 2013
- 1,492
There is no doubt that YouTube is the single most popular video platform of the world. Its name is easily recognizable, viral videos on the service gather millions and millions of views while there are also quite a few people who make a (very decent) living through videos that they upload on the Google-owned video hosting website.
With all that power, one might think that YouTube is also a very good source of money but alas, that is not the case. Despite the fact that YouTube actually got $4 billion in revenue last year, the site barely broken even after paying for its content and the equipment needed to run it. This was quite unexpected considering the fact that the company had a revenue of $3 billion in 2013 and was still unprofitable.
Of course, there are several reasons for this. For example, YouTube’s core audience consists of teens and young adults and the video platform does not have a lot of ways to monetize its content. Ad-blocking services are an issue but Google is trying to find new ways of upping the value of its services like providing original content and slowly turning YouTube into a video platform that will better resemble TV along with all of its merits (and potential downsides).
With all that power, one might think that YouTube is also a very good source of money but alas, that is not the case. Despite the fact that YouTube actually got $4 billion in revenue last year, the site barely broken even after paying for its content and the equipment needed to run it. This was quite unexpected considering the fact that the company had a revenue of $3 billion in 2013 and was still unprofitable.
Of course, there are several reasons for this. For example, YouTube’s core audience consists of teens and young adults and the video platform does not have a lot of ways to monetize its content. Ad-blocking services are an issue but Google is trying to find new ways of upping the value of its services like providing original content and slowly turning YouTube into a video platform that will better resemble TV along with all of its merits (and potential downsides).