Google Losing Up To $1.65M a Day On YouTube

An anonymous reader writes "The average visitor to YouTube is costing Google between one and two dollars, according to new research that shows Google losing up to $1.65 million per day on the video site. More than two years after Google acquired YouTube, income from premium offers and other revenue generators don't offset YouTube's expenses of content acquisition, bandwidth, and storage. YouTube is expected to serve 75 billion video streams to 375 million unique visitors in 2009, costing Google up to $2,064,054 a day, or $753 million annualized. Revenue projections for YouTube fall between $90 million and $240 million." Maybe this is in part because, as Al writes, "Researchers from HP Palo Alto studied videos uploaded to YouTube and found that popularity has little to do with quality or persistence."

Comments

Re:Youtube and the death of the advertising model

[shadow349]

Youtube is only the first domino in Google's house of cards.

Checkmate.

Re:REALLY now?

[eldavojohn]

"Researchers from HP Palo Alto studied videos uploaded to YouTube and found that popularity has little to do with quality or persistence." Let me be the first to say "I told you so."

The researchers found some very useful information though--like the fact that a man getting kicked in the testicles is just as funny or maybe even more funny in grainy home video than in high definition. After performing principal component analysis on several testicle injury clips rated across thousands of users, they found--surprisingly--that the most important variables are (1) how wide the victim's eyes opened upon impact, (2) how loud of a scream the victim emitted upon impact and (3) how long the victim lay motionless on the ground after initial agony.

Priceless...

[TibbonZero]

Content Acquisition - $710,000
Revenue Sharing - $66,000
Administrative Costs - $252,000
Being the number 1 video site on the internet.... Priceless

Re:The Real Reason

[MightyMartian]

Sweet sweet irony.