YouTube now represents a fast growing share of Alphabet’s revenue. In 2020, following a change in tactics on display advertising that had been expected for several years, the growth in revenues of the World’s number One video platform (30%) largely exceeded that of the Google’s search engine (6%) in 2020. For a long time, Alphabet has prioritized engagement and related data collection on YouTube, rather than revenue collection. Using this method, which made it easy for users to escape viewing advertisements, Mountain View turned a popular vlogging site into a go-to platform in almost every country in the World. In France, YouTube now gathers 46 million unique visitors each month. Worldwide, the number of monthly users of the platform is around two billion ! No pressure Initially, Alphabet did not put pressure on YouTube to be profitable. As the American professor Stan Leibowitz explained in his 2018 study: « in the most extreme…
