That's conjecture, and so is my view, but I disagree. They've even developed specialized hardware just to deal with all the transcoding they have to do, specialized for YouTube. There's a lot of effort that goes into maintaining things that are unique to this particular service. But in the end, what matters is if they could make more money by spending their resources elsewhere.
Google already owns so much server and bandwidth infrastructure the marginal cost is likely very low
That's conjecture, and so is my view, but I disagree. They've even developed specialized hardware just to deal with all the transcoding they have to do, specialized for YouTube. There's a lot of effort that goes into maintaining things that are unique to this particular service. But in the end, what matters is if they could make more money by spending their resources elsewhere.