That doesn’t really matter, unless you expect the video feature to be unprofitable. With ~300m or whatever active users, it would not be hard to raise money if they need it to launch a major product like that.
There’s 0 chance it would be profitable. They probably could have built it with a lot of external funding, but it would probably never have become profitable
Google is still trying to figure out how to make YouTube profitable
That doesn’t really matter, unless you expect the video feature to be unprofitable. With ~300m or whatever active users, it would not be hard to raise money if they need it to launch a major product like that.
There’s 0 chance it would be profitable. They probably could have built it with a lot of external funding, but it would probably never have become profitable
Google is still trying to figure out how to make YouTube profitable