Cody Taylor

The man who wrote “Never Gonna Give You Up,” the 1980’s song revitalized by the Rickrolling phenomena on YouTube last year accuses Google of exploiting him.

An anonymous reader writes “The average visitor to YouTube is costing Google between one and two dollars, according to new research that shows Google losing up to .65 million per day on the video site. More than two years after Google acquired YouTube, income from premium offers and other revenue generators don’t offset YouTube’s expenses of content acquisition, bandwidth, and storage. YouTube is expected to serve 75 billion video streams to 375 million unique visitors in 2009, costing Google up to ,064,054 a day, or 3 million annualized. Revenue projections for YouTube fall between million and 0 million.” Maybe this is in part because, as Al writes, “Researchers from HP Palo Alto studied videos uploaded to YouTube and found that popularity has little to do with quality or persistence.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Interesting and highly unpopular point. But I guess he is right, YouTube will need to make money at some point. Google is not really a charity.