Interestingly, the figures here suggest that YouTube themselves may be getting something in the ballpark of $50/month for a moderately popular video. That might sound like a lot, but 10k views on a 100MB video also means 1TB/month in extra bandwidth charges. For comparison, if they were an Amazon S3 customer, that alone would cost $50.
This makes me wonder how much of a license to print money their “free” business model actually is. Would they be sustainable if ad-blocking reduced their ad revenue by 5%? Or 10%? I’m thinking that YouTube may not enjoy their sole dependence on ads any more than the rest of us do.
