Wow! What could you do with 1 Billion-views a day?

If you didn’t hear about it, last week YouTube announced that it’s getting over 1 billion (that’s 9 zeros!) views per day.

At first, I thought “wow, that’s a

lot of videos” but I quickly asked myself “Are they turning a profit?” You can have a billion views, but at the end of the day profit is what keeps a company in business.

The answer appears to be no, they’re not. YouTube was purchased by Google and what I find scary is this: “Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, said in July he is optimistic about YouTube turning a profit. The company, based in Mountain View, California, doesn’t break out revenue for the site.”

The good news for YouTube is its owners have deep pockets so they can run at a loss until they figure out how to make a profit from it. So, the moral of the story seems to be if you can get 1 billion views per day to your site, maybe someone with deep pockets will buy it even if you’re not making enough money to cover the bills! Is it just me or am I missing some basic business rules here?

For the rest of us in the real business world we need to remember there is no parent company covering the bills. Every day you need to keep an eye on sales and get those revenues coming in the door.

So the real moral of the story is to take the time to dream about what you would do with 1 billion visits, but you still need to make money to cover the bills. The end.