That is only true is your primary concern in life is personal wealth and you’re burning other people’s money.
The bandwidth costs made it deeply loss making for a long time despite having loads of engagement and ad revenue. However over time they became more cost efficient at sending video over the internet and became profitable.
This strategy obviously doesn't always work, with WeWork being the canonical example. But it's not guaranteed to fail either.
The capabilities of LLMs are impressive, but none of them have published an idea I consider to have the same potential for a trillion $ monopoly that the current hype looks like.
There are far more similarities with the dot-com hype.
No critical first mover advantage in sight. All parts are replaceable for the cheapest variant with little to no down side to users.
There were LOTS of funded competitors to YouTube between 2006 and 2009, including Viddler (who paid Gary Vaynerchuk a small fortune to host his WineLibraryTV show there exclusively), DailyMotion (which is still alive today, although no longer a threatening contender), etc.
In 2009 I had a coaching business and was buying marketing courses and software which would deploy your videos across 40+ different video websites (including Google Video which was a separate thing until they acquired YouTube and merged those), and YouTube wasn't yet amounting to 50% of our video traffic.
I think you might be mistaken with the bold statement above.
