Tbh I’m 99% youtube has been very profitable for a long time. Google said it wasn’t, once, like… A decade ago? And I think people just internalized that and didn’t realize it changed.

As far as I know, there’s a lot of info they don’t share, and a company can very easily appear “unprofitable” if the profit is immediately reinvested into the company, or by other tricks. People also say amazon is unprofitable, sometimes, and, yeah, no.