Production, most likely

I did. They reported $31.5 Billion in revenue for 2023.

Im not finding any concrete report on their expenses, but I did find some best guesses as speculated by users. This reddit thread from 7 years ago, is estimating about $2 billion in expenses.

Let’s assume that since this was 7 years ago things have gotten drastically more expensive for YouTube, and throw an additional buffer on top of that since we can’t be 100% sure. Let’s pentuple their proposed operating costs, and, hell, let’s also be VERY generous and say that they keep a work force of 5,000 people who each make… Let’s say $120,000/yr?

That would come out to about $10.6 billion/yr in business expenses. Even if you factor in the payments to top earning YouTubers, those only measure in the 10s of millions… Okay… Let’s be reeeeal generous to YouTube here and assume that this guy from r/theydidthemath 7 years ago was WAY off. Let’s assume he was off by half of YouTubers actual expenses. Following our (absolutely ludicrous) estimates of their expenses going up by a factor of 5 and their 5,000 employees averaging out to $120,000/yr salaries; YouTube would still be reporting under $21 billion a year in expenses. That means they are net profit $10 billion a year even with the insanely expensive operating costs we assigned them here.

$10 billion. Let me put that into perspective. 10 million seconds is about 115 days. So 10 million seconds in the past was just about the new Year. 10 billion seconds however was 317 years ago.

This idea that YouTube isn’t profitable is equal parts ridiculous and hilarious. I just sat here for 15 minutes waxing accountant at you, but none of that was even necessary. YouTube is a business (technically it’s Google but you get the point), if it wasn’t profitable, it wouldn’t exist. Period.

1. Old series that has a decent following of mostly niche dedicated fans is left to sit without a new installment for many years.

2. New title is announced. It’s sells gang-busters and flips the community on its head.

3. Corporate Executives prioritize short term profits and begin planning a quick and easy cash grab. !

4. Second new installment comes out. It is a shell of the previous title with the soul sucked clean out.

5. Fans are dissapointed and outside of a small niche following the game series falls into obscurity.

6. Repeat.

! we are here right now

Look… Maybe BG4 will be good. But after watching this exact cycle play out over and over again for the past decade I’m not sure how you can expect anything else.

Don’t… Don’t give me hope…

I can guarantee there is a significant number of people who do want more AI crap.

Hell I can understand why. If it was done ethically and with user privacy as a core tenant of its implementation I would probably love having convenient access to AI tools like that… But this is Microsoft so I think I’m gonna instead go the opposite direction and add this to the list of reasons my next PC will be Linux

Okay but forcing someone to pay you $550k (averaging your values) to not die maybe is still incredibly fucking awful, so it’s really not hard to be better than that.

I can respect that developing a personalized vaccine might take a lot of work but I’m not a chemist. I don’t know how much work it actually takes, nor do I know how many vaccines a person would realistically need to cure their cancer be it stage 1 up to stage 4?

What I do know is that if this vaccine ends up being more effective than the traditional method then it is a wonderful discovery, but if it leads to life-long medical debt and subsequent financial ruin all the same your life is still fucked… I guess I’d rather be poor and alive, but I’d also rather not be destitute.

Gallows humor really does hit different when your 2 hours into doom scrolling lol