Even though it's the best place to find moving images of groin trauma and live TV mess ups, YouTube is losing money at record pace. This year the video-sharing site is projected to lose $470 million.
YouTube's popularity seems to be what is dragging it down. Although the site gets a lot of traffic, there is no way to capitalize on it. Unlike other sites that make money off of ads, most of YouTube's user-generated content is, to put it nicely, nothing an advertiser would want to endorse. As a result, less than 10% of YouTube videos receive advertising.
At the same time, it's hard to keep up with storage and streaming of videos when any dork (see above) can upload and view as many as they want. The site spends $360 million in bandwidth costs alone.
Hopefully they can find a way to make the site viable, because if i can't watch chimps riding Segways at a moment's notice, I'm not sure if life is worth living.
--Cody
Photo taken from this photostream and used with permission of a Creative Commons license.
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