No profit for YouTube
YouTube is one of the most popular video streaming services in the world. It has over a billion active viewers, but according to a report from the Wall Street Journal, the site still has zero profit. This could be a reason why YouTube has been exploring a paid, advert-free version of its service for some time. Not to mention, users will be given the opportunity to pay a monthly YouTube Music Key subscription.
Until now, YouTube only accounted for 6% of Google’s ad sales, which giving them $4 billion in revenue in 2014. This might be surprising given the fact that YouTube is the second most popular search engine in the world. There are millions of new clips every day, but still a lot of people are doing their best to avoid advertisements. Instead of watching videos directly from YouTube, users tend to use embedded videos and shared links. They don’t need to enter the site like they do for Twitter or Facebook, and that’s the main reason why most users are occasional viewers – only 9% of them account for 85% of the total views on YouTube.
Google attempts to change the customers' habits. The company keeps investing hundreds of millions of dollars in original content, but it seems that the main competitors are getting stronger. Facebook posted $3 billion in profit for 2014 and most of the users are watching clips directly from their wall. On the other hand, both Facebook and Twitter are developing their own streaming service – without YouTube’s links.
What do you think? Is this the beginning of the end of the YouTube?
Source: The Wall Street Journal
