Hidden Revenue

How they do it: YouTube’s platform, website and mobile apps are all free to use. In fact, over 5 billion videos are watched every day. In the absence of paying customers, advertisements on YouTube cross-finance the vast infrastructure needed to support YouTube’s operations.

Leverage Customer Data

How they do it: Data collected via YouTube is shared with Alphabet / Google, and vice-versa. This improves efficiency and effectiveness of advertising campaigns by the company or third parties.

Long Tail

How they do it: While a spectacular 10,113 YouTube videos generated over 1 billion views, among the platform’s over 5 billion individual uploads there are many that have only been watched a handful of times, consisting of a long tail of niche videos.

Two-sided Market

How they do it: YouTube’s platform features a set of key stakeholders: Their users, creators, rights holders of music videos and copyrighted content, and advertisers. Reconciliating stakeholder needs in this ecosystem or multi-sided market is a key challenge for YouTube.

User Designed

How they do it: YouTube’s platform enables creators and brands to upload their videos. In 2018, a total 300 hours of video were uploaded to YouTube every minute.

Prosumer

How they do it: The video platform YouTube is crowded with users who produce professional content that is then consumed by others, represented by the social currency of the number of followers. As prosumers they earn money by allowing providers to play special ads before their videos.