YouTube To Generate $3.6 Billion In Revenue This Year

Sites include Google.com , YouTube.com . Published on July 15th, 2012. Written by Anthony West.

With a full scale advertising and promotion machinery now operational at YouTube, the video sharing site looks set to deliver on all the promise and expectation surrounding Google’s purchase all those years ago.

Last year YouTube made $1.1 billion in revenue, slightly shy of the $1.7 billion Citi’s Mark Mahaney had predicted, but significant enough to have many (including investors) happy about the performance. For years YouTube has been a loss leader and skeptics were unsure about how best Google could go about monetizing the platform.

That skepticism is all but gone now thanks to Google’s ram-advertising-on-their-screen approach. Mahaney is now predicting revenues of $3.6 billion this year—double estimates he made for the previous period. YouTube now has its platform users tolerant of in-your-face advertising and the video sharing giant has even open up its platform to small business and corporate advertisers.

I many ways it’s almost impossible for YouTube not to make money. It still holds the distinction of being the number one video sharing destination online and users still have much of the freedom they had 5 years ago. Mark Mahaney wasn’t spot on with his first prediction but that could change this year. We’ll see.

Perhaps it’s a good thing that YouTube is now earning big bucks; after the massive push to make Google+ number one in the social networking space, investors were starting to get a little bit anxious.