Does YouTube actually make any money?

While the video sharing website is so phenomenally popular that it has become the second biggest search engine in the world – there's still precious little information on whether the money is rolling in.

While parent company Google has to divulge certain financial details thanks to its publicly-traded status, it remains highly secretive about the numbers produced by its individual business units.

That's where Spencer Wang, an analyst with Credit Suisse, steps in. By Wang's estimates, the video site is due to lose $470m this year – an incredible amount for a website that Google bought for $1.65bn just two and a half years ago.

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