Technology

I believe that there isn't because, at least as I understand it, it costs considerably more money than it makes to operate it. It gets less bad at scale like Google has achieved, but they still lose money on it, so it seems doubtful that anyone else could break in and beat them at that game.

They continue to operate it because they get a variety of other things from it that don't directly make the YouTube division money, but feed into their other divisions where they collectively generate considerably more money than YouTube loses from it, in the form of user personal preference and demographic data collection, network affect driving users to their other services, and direct tie in to their juggernaut ad network.

Its not too much different than "loss leader" products at the store, which you may have heard of. The idea is that you take some product that almost everyone frequently buys, like milk or eggs, and you put one of the lower priced ones on extreme sale, often even at a loss, essentially all the time to drive traffic to your store. You put those products way in the back, and customers will often buy a bunch of other stuff on their way to and from getting it. The profits from the other products well exceed the loss on the "loss leader" one, even when some customers only by the loss leader, so the store considers it a winning strategy.