• PC World, Wednesday, July 22, 2009 2:51 PM

In a blog post titled "YouTube Myth Busting," Google hit back at critics of the popular video-sharing site. Spokesmen Chris Dale and Aaron Zamost deflected questions raised in the press about the site's finances, as well as the quality of videos the service offers. "Too often, stories dredge up issues about YouTube products, metrics, or the state of our business that we thought were settled a long time ago," they said.

The blog post follows statements made by Google CFO Patrick Pichette during the search giant's second quarter earnings call last week in which Pichette said YouTube would be "very profitable" in the near future. PC World's Jared Newman is not convinced, however. "Questions abound, though, including the amount of money it must cost to run such a massive video-sharing site," Newman says, adding: "The YouTube Biz Blog does not care for such concerns."

Indeed, Dale and Zamost fail to elaborate on YouTube's finances, except to say that YouTube's homemade infrastructure invalidates standard industry pricing. There's no mention of how far in the red the site is; in fact, they don't elaborate beyond saying that the site is growing steadily, and growth is good. What kind of growth are we talking about? The Google execs don't say.

Dale and Zamost also dispute the claim that only 3 percent to 5 percent of the site is monetized, but they don't offer a better figure. They note that monetized views are more important than percentages, and those have tripled every year, but Newman notes that this doesn't get around the fact that the user-generated portion of the site is much larger, and remains funded by ad-supported content.

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