YouTube’s Sea of Red Ink Downgraded to Great Lake Status
by Peter Kafka
Posted on September 10, 2009 at 3:00 AM PT
Remember when the analysts at Credit Suisse decided that YouTube was losing close to half a billion dollars a year? That was then–five months ago, to be precise–and this is now: Those same analysts estimate that Google’s video site is losing a mere…$410 million a year.
That’s still not going to appease the folks at YouTube, who take umbrage at the assumptions analysts Spencer Wang and Kenneth Sena make when assessing the site’s financials.
But until the YouTube guys can provide the outside world with concrete numbers about their costs, sales, etc.–which they may never do–they’ll have to deal with a variety of guesses.
For what it’s worth, what’s changed here are the analysts’ guesstimates about YouTube’s bandwidth costs: They used to think the site was plowing through $360 million to deliver all those clips; now they think the number is $300 million. They’ve left all their other estimates unchanged.
Meanwhile, some perspective: Google’s YouTube adventure is still less than three years old. The “two kings,” as co-founder Chad Hurley put it in this video, only got together in October 2006.
[Image credit: greeblie]
