Originally Posted by raymor

The idea that they are losing that much money totaling ignores the primary
benefit GOOG gets from youtube right now - market share. They could probably
sell the youtube.com name alone for 2 billion dollars. Just as "google"
has become a verb that people use every day, saying "google it before asking here",
they are making youtube THE site for video. Remember the search engine wars?
Back in the 1990s companies spent hundreds of millions to get and keep a
peice of the search engine pie. All of the other SEs are pretty much gone.
Now that Google IS search, they are monetizing the hell out of out, but first
they had to firmly establish their ownership of the search game. I'm sure now
that the word "YouTube" is used by news anchors to mean "the internet", the
very bright guys and gals at goog have monetization plans that will kick in real
soon.