Except it's not a service that costs much money to run, so much as it is a giant silo exploiting the fact that lots of video is uploaded there. Don't you remember YouTube in 2005 before Google's purchase? It made ends meet all by itself, apparently.
OK, video quality is higher now but, but they could make the lower-quality video freely accessible -- and so could lots of other possible video-upload sites without charging $15. The value-add is not why you're paying $15.
> Don't you remember YouTube in 2005 before Google's purchase? It made ends meet all by itself, apparently.
They were burning VC funding the whole time. Youtube didn't become profitable until a few years ago even with Google ads being there it took that much scale and added ads for them to start breaking even on it.
No it didn't make ends meet it raised something like $35m from vc and was running at a loss of around $1m a month which is why they were so quick to sell to Google despite the growth.
They also started ads in 2006 before Google bought them
OK, video quality is higher now but, but they could make the lower-quality video freely accessible -- and so could lots of other possible video-upload sites without charging $15. The value-add is not why you're paying $15.