This week YouTube hosted Brandcast 2025 in which it revealed how marketers could make better use of the platform to connect with customers.
A few new so-called innovations were announced at the event but one has caught the attention of the internet – Peak Points. This new product makes use of Gemini to detect “the most meaningful, or ‘peak’, moments within YouTube’s popular content to place your brand where audiences are the most engaged”.
Essentially, YouTube will use Gemini and probably the heatmap generated on YouTube videos by people skipping to popular points, to determine where to place advertising. Anybody who has grown up watching terrestrial television where adverts arrive as a way to build suspense will understand how annoying Peak Points could become.
Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t YouTube still running year over year at a loss?
Last I checked Alphabet had something like $60 billion in profit.
At this point, they probably consider YouTube to be a loss leader while they siphon up everyone’s data.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube#Finances
I don’t think so.
Revenue is not profit.
Yes, I know, but I doubt 8.6 billions per quarter aren’t enough to make a profit.
They haven’t stated their operating costs, so you’re only speculating.
Operating costs are not known with that granularity, to my knowledge, but it’s a good guess. Best anybody can tell Youtube is 10-ish percent of all of Alphabet’s ad revenue and they have a subscription model as well. Not to mention the data gathering for AI training, plus all the intangible benefits from owning all the video on the Internet, from using Youtube tech for Google Drive stored videos to… you know, owning all the video on the Internet. And all of that without investing the ungodly amount of money Netflix and the other streaming competitors do on content. People just… upload that crap.
However their internal accounting breaks down, I’m pretty sure nobody thinks Youtube is bleeding money.
YouTube was almost bankrupted because the cost of storage, servers and bandwidth greatly overran the ad revenue. Every idiot with 2 subscribers uploading dozens of hours of content cost them a ton of money. It is easy to underestimate how expensive video streaming infrastructure is.
Oh, it’s extraordinarily expensive, and what people really underestimate is how HUGE Google’s storage requirements actually are.
Thing is, it’s also a ton of money. Youtube isn’t just ad-driven video streaming, it’s also a Spotify competitor, a Twitch competitor, a video subscription service (and for some reason they still have a movie and show rental thing in there). 10% of all of Alphabet’s money is a LOT of money, and this isn’t the only business of theirs that demands insane storage requirements.
I’m sure they’ll tighten requirements eventually, and they’ve already done a ton of throttling, but they, again, own Internet video.
Let me put it this way, I think if Google decided to offer Youtube to either of us for a dollar on the condition we can’t resell it to anybody and we have to keep running it forever we’d both still take it.
its also why they allow more right wing content on the site too, conservatives love outrage and youtube provides now
I’m not sure about that. what would I do? manipulate elections? manipulate public opinion? I’m not an advertising company to be able to do that
Yes, if you re-read my previous comment I said I don’t think they are losing money.
Facebook has spent something like 70 billion dollars on the “metaverse” with nothing to show for it, so it’s very possible.
I mean it must be? The only income it has is based on ads from Google.