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this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
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No Stupid Questions
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Twitter probably doesn't take to that much space (comparatively) because it's mostly text with some images.
YouTube is another matter. There's an enormous amount of content uploaded to YouTube, as much as 30,000 hours of video uploaded per hour. That's around 1PB per hour assuming most videos are uploaded in 1080p.
I wasn't able to find an official source for what YouTube's total data storage is, but this estimate puts it at 10 EB or 10,000,000,000 GB of video.
On Amazon AWS that would cost $3 Billion per month to store. The actual cost to Google is probably much lower because of economy of scale and because it is run by and optimized for them, but it is still a colossal figure. They offset the cost with ads, data collection, and premium subscription, but I would imagine running YouTube is still a net loss for Google.
I'm generally the first to criticize Google, but when it comes to pushing ads on YouTube I'm having a hard time really condemning them for it. I struggle to wrap my head around how this service can exist at all.
Also, second to direct transactions, I'd much rather have Google make money through ads than anything else.
Agreed, I pay for YouTube premium and in the world of corporate crap and fees and stuff I’m ok with that value trade off relatively. Hell, I would have paid for Reddit, too, if they weren’t assholes.
Edit: I mistyped Google premium instead of YouTube premium… same place though of course
Issue has become that in this era of business you could drop 100k on a car and they'll still data mine information on you and record you. So you really only paid to be less annoyed, but the tracking remains a core part of the system.
Now some stuff like proton email do make privacy a part of their business, but that is becoming rarer. Everyone is the product by default no matter how much money they pay for a service these days.
They'll make it through data collection too even if you pay for premium. You are still the product even if you pay in this era.
If it's really 1 PB per hour, and mostly 1080p or higher (which seems likely, unlike the assumptions in that Quora answer) then they would fill about 9 EB every year! Obviously the rate would be lower in the past, but that 30k link was a number as of a year ago anyway.
I doubt it, youtube generates about 30 billion in revenue per year!
Holy shit I didn't know it was that insane.
It gets even crazier when you realize they are sort of obligated to keep every video forever. So it will just keep growing indefinitely since they have no way to trim it down. We may eventually reach a point where the majority of the content that they host is older than most living people and the uploader has since passed on.
They won't, eventually they'll pull a Imgur and start deleting stuff that hasn't been accessed in a while.
I mean didn't they just announce they'll start deleting inactive accounts?
But even if not, storage always becomes cheaper with time, so it's just a matter of copying old data to a newer medium. Eventually that will become an issue, but for now, capacity and storage density keeps growing.
They stated they would delete the accounts but that the videos would remain. But obviously the policy could change. My point was more that a ton of people would be watching content that was uploaded by and for people who are no longer alive. Which makes me feel uncomfortable in a way I can't quite describe. Like a modern version of seeing a ghost.
If I remember correctly YouTube has been run at a loss basically since its inception, but it's such a popular platform (and such an efficient vehicle for advertisement) that they keep it running. Google makes up the difference elsewhere. It's like Costco's loss leader hot dogs, it literally costs them money to sell it to you, but it gets you inside the store where you're likely to buy other stuff. YouTube costs Google money to maintain, but it gets people creating Google accounts and watching ads, and recently over the past few years it also gets people buying YT Premium.
Besides, so much propaganda of all sorts is channeled through YouTube that if Google ever seriously considered shutting it down I expect they'd have a boardroom full of shareholders immediately putting their foot down about it. YouTube is no longer about the cost, it's about the platform accessibility and the existing userbase.