This is what I was wondering too, and just to be clear, my thought was that YouTube must be making less profit than they'd like to. Of course I don't know if that's the case, and a quick search didn't yield good results either (possibly because of a poor search term).

Don't expect this every day, but today's free game at the Epic Store is Fallout 3: Game of the Year Edition: https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/fallout-3-game-of-the-year-edition

Three games for Humble Choice January 2024 have been leaked.

• Marvel's Midnight Suns
• Two Point Campus
• Aragami 2

Plausible, considering they're part of a big tech company. The whole ad push is so weird considering I'd expect the cost of data transit and storage to be going down compared to 10-15 years ago.

I'd guess that storing and streaming 4K videos is expensive, but not enough to make them lose money.

But hey, any excuse is valid to keep pushing their monetization plans.

Iirc YT has never been profitable for Google; it's always been a loss leader getting people into their profitable services (like search) - only now the costs are exponentially increasing with the rise in popularity of 4k content. Of course no one forced YT to start supporting 4k content in the first place but this is the route they've chosen.

Well, Google has had more than 15 years to turn Youtube into something profitable. Maybe they suck.

Bought The Callisto Protocol + all the DLC at 23€.

^ I thought about buying that one too since the price is the lowest it has been, but man, the reviews seem rough.

No one knows how much YouTube costs to run, Alphabet has never divulged it. We didn't even know its revenue before 2020.

We do know though that YT streams around 50% more than Netflix, and Netflix's operating expenses are roughly $25 billion. YouTube made $29 billion from revenues and $11 million from Premium subscriptions last year.

Assuming higher server expenses for YT (all those old videos) and higher bandwidth expenses for Netflix (very likely) roughly cancel each other out, YT *should* be profitable, or right on the threshold.

Less than 20 € for me in the Humble Store (due to my Humble Choice sub):