this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2024
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Yeah, I don't mean that YouTube is unprofitable. It's probably hugely profitable, and now they're focusing on maximizing that profit.

But with something like Twitch, which claims to have been unprofitable for a decade or more, I can believe that simply because of the low interest rates that allow them to perpetually keep burning money and that the value of these platforms is measured by the potential profit from the userbase - whether through ad revenue, data, or something else - rather than the money they're making right now. This is why Verizon bought Tumblr for like a billion dollars or whatever. That was the estimated value of the company, despite it never turning a profit, simply based on the potential revenue from its userbase. It's also why Verizon ended up selling Tumblr for like 1% of what they paid for it 3 years later. Because they ran off that userbase and the rest weren't deemed valuable for advertisers.