Friday Fun Link – How Much Did It Cost Google To Stream “Gangnam Style” 600 Million Times? Did They Make a Profit?

[Edit: This video is now poised to be the first YouTube clip to reach 1 billion views, amazingly in less than six months!]

[Edit2: Some further analysis of the revenue Gangnam created.]

“Gangnam Style”, a quirky Korean pop song with a very “uniquely” stylish video is the second most watched clip in the history of YouTube with over 600 million views as I type this and is projected to soon eclipse the current #1, Canadian Justin Bieber’s “Baby” video which has 795 million views.

A poster on Quora asked how much it would have cost Google/YouTube to stream this video that many times and whether there’s any way they could’ve made a profit on showing something 600 million times.  The answer, at least hypothetically and with a lot of assumptions about proprietary Google operational inforamtion, is yes – the cost was extremely high but so was the profit – something like $350 000 to stream the video that many times and $400 000 in revenue from ads related to the video.