YouTube finances prior to acquisition...
I’m not exactly sure why Viacom dug up YouTube’s profit and loss statement and balance sheet from its pre-Google days, but I’m glad they did. You can see the full thing, which covers its birth in the spring of 2005 through August 2006, at the bottom of this post.
But these excerpts give you a very good snapshot of what was going on in the company’s early days — hyper-growth, followed, eventually, by revenue (click to enlarge):
Some context: Chad Hurley registered the YouTube domain in February 2005, but the site wasn’t up and running for a few more months. Cofounder Jared Karim uploaded YouTube’s first video (“Me at the zoo“) in late April 2005.
By December 2005, users were uploading 6,000 clips a day, and the site was streaming 2.5 million videos a day. By February 2006, those numbers had jumped to 20,000 and 18 million, respectively. In July 2006, YouTube users uploaded 2.1 million clips and watched 3 billion of them.
Which explains the skyrocketing Web hosting bills. But do note that burst of revenue from direct sales in August 2006, which let the company generate a gross profit. A lot of people assumed that YouTube had to find a buyer like Google (GOOG) a few months later, because it could never pay its own bandwidth bill. But these numbers suggest that may not be true.
Also of note for Web video and Web ad nerds/historians: Check out the detailed breakdown of YouTube’s ad revenue and hosting costs, both real and projected, circa December 2005.
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