2005:  YouTube loses $271 million

2006:  YouTube loses $276 million

2007:  Google buys YouTube for $1.7 billion

Google doesn’t break out how much YouTube is losing.  However, the pesky problem of just how to monetize user-generated video clips remains unsolved while the dramatic growth in YouTube viewership continues unabated - with nothing to offset the costs of scaling up bandwidth and hardware to meet the increasing demand,  is it unreasonable to estimate that YouTube may be losing somewhere upwards of $1 million per day by now?

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You spend enough time thinking about internet television, and you start assuming that the interactive possibilities of the new medium would be obvious to anyone - especially someone in the business.  Every now and then, though, you get a reminder that the traditional linear model is so deeply ingrained in everyone’s way of thinking about what television is supposed to be that sometimes even the industry doesn’t quite see the forest for the trees.
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