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Comment by t34543 | Hacker News Reader

YouTube is a precious archive of another time in all our lives. Let’s hope it’s not eaten up by the chase of profit and/or politics.

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> by the chase of profit

I am honestly surprised how Google was able to keep up YouTube for so long despite a severe lack of profits. Even though Youtube made a net loss in the hundreds of millions for years Google kept it up and running and drastically expanded its feature set into areas like live streaming etc.

As far as I know YouTube has now reached break even, but I believe Google deserves credit for having the vision and tolerance for failure to keep YouTube up for such a long time without a dollar of profit, not to speak of the enormous political and financial risk YouTube poses because of copyrighted or harmful material.

It would be interesting to hear an updated figure now. My impressions is heavily increased monetization across the whole thing. Nowadays, more than one ad shown, often unskippable, and constant nags/"reminders" about YT prime (red?) and Music.

I don't think Google deserves credit for keeping a money losing YouTube alive for so long. It's anti-competitive. Innovation that might have existed and been better was likely strangled because it couldn't compete with the money losing behemoth that is (or was) YouTube.

I do think they get credit for not killing it off, as they often do to other projects. Are the YouTube losses equivalent to loose change to Google? Probably, but that won’t stop me from being thankful someone had the vision to keep it alive.

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