Hah I could monetize the hell out of that traffic with some pops and exits, they're just too conservative with their ads!
I am agreed on this. Anyone can monetize it. If they don't monetize the traffic, it is probably that they dont want to do it now. YouTube is probably the second search engine by queries in the world (of course behind Google) even though it is not concieved as a search engine. Just having the information on what is searched, where and when is worth keeping it. So, if it is not shown monetary, it exists as very powerful non-monetary asset.
A fair amount of the data in that article is badly flawed. The largest part of what people THINK YouTube costs is bandwidth. The flaw, however, is that Google doesn't pay nearly as much for bandwidth as people think, since they settle the vast majority of their traffic for free on public exchanges, and very little of that is paid settlement. Sure, they have to pay for dark fiber infrastructure to connect their datacenters to the various peering points, but that's far cheaper than actually paying for transit, and Google has much of that infrastructure in place already to support their search business. All they have to do is upgrade the electronics on either end of a piece of dark fiber and they can take circuits from Gig-E to 100Gig-E and beyond. Everyone laughed at Google when they bought YouTube thinking that it would be a giant money pit. What they didn't realize was that Google is one of the few players in the world that had the infrastructure in place to take YouTube from being a money loser and turn it into a profitable piece of their business, which I believe it is.