Anmuth’s reasoning: YouTube’s revenue will jump 55 percent this year to $700 million driven by increased usage and higher monetization rates. He points to some statistics that YouTube has let out recently, including that most top advertisers are advertising on YouTube and that the site is monetizing more than one billion video views each week.

SEE ALSO: Analyst: YouTube Will Lose Almost $500 Million This Year

Oddly, no mention of YouTube’s cost structure, which has led to much of the skepticism over Google’s claims that YouTube is on the way to financial success. For instance, CreditSuisse analyst Spencer Wang initially said last summer that while YouTube’s revenue was certainly increasing, the jump was being offset by a staggering $710 million in costs, including $360 million in bandwidth costs alone. Another report put YouTube’s bandwidth costs at a fraction of that amount because of peering but still projected a significant operating loss at the site.

For its part, Google has maintained that it builds its own infrastructure so it’s difficult to use “standard industry pricing” when measuring YouTube cost structure; “We are at a point where growth is definitely good for our bottom line, not bad,” YouTube representatives said in a post over the summer.

Would of course be helpful if Google would provide some numbers to back up its assertions.