According to a report from Credit Suisse, YouTube might lose approximately $470 million in 2009, mainly because of bandwith costs from all the user generated content.
The main problem with YouTube is that monetization of content remains a big challenge, with infrastructural costs growing, and advertisting revenues not catching up.

An interesting post from The Slate shows that YouTube’s problems are very similar to those faced by newspaper, where printing and distribution costs sometimes are not balanced with advertising.

YouTube and Newspapers are not alone in this game; Facebook is facing the same growth in storage and bandwith due to UGC from the now 200 million user base. Techcrunch reported that facebook is spending almost $1 million a month just for electricity.

The Silicon Alley on his post “Is YouTube dommed” states:

Credit Suisse estimates YouTube will manage to rake in about $240 million in ad revenue in 2009, against operating costs of roughly $711 million, leading to a shortfall of just over $470 million. This half-billion dollar loss comes after more than a year of feverish experimentation in various forms of advertising, cross-product embedding, licensing and partnership deals.