this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2023
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Crappy Design
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How are they supposed to pay for the infrastructure that you're using to watch it. Do you even have a clue what it costs to run YouTube for a month? The ads keep the servers up. BTW it's in the tens of millions a month if not more to run YouTube.
No one has a clue what it 'costs' because YT isn't honest about revenue, and being a subsidiary its P&L statements can be adjusted to spread any narrative around profitability it considers useful. In the context of Alphabet its operating cost is probably negligible.
You're already paying them data tribute through daily interaction with much of the corporate web.
I literally don't have a job and host a website with 249971 requests served april-october. This shit isn't expensive, google makes it expensive. Before YouTube we just had other websites with videos.
e: I got it wrong, it's 525154 (valid) requests april-october with 85340 unique IPs after filtering my own.
Requests cost nothing, data storage and bandwidth usage do.
People upload over 500 hours of videos every minute, that's 256.320.000hours each year. Let's say that most of it is lower quality instead of 4K, so each hour takes 0.5GB of storage. That's 128PB every year. Youtube overall size probably reached Exabytes in the last few years.
Their daily bandwidth usage probably ranges way into Petabytes too, something you were orders of magnitude away over the whole life cycle of your site.
Literally everyone is not listening to what I'm saying so I'll just say it here again as clear as I can:
YouTube costs money because infrastructure costs are exponential. It doesn't have to be that way. Host your own shit, it's so unbelievably cheap.
I have my own live-streaming infrastructure. I have my own music streaming infrastructure. I have my own video sync infrastructure that so far has not even stuttered for people on the other side of the globe even with 30+ people watching at once. This costs jack shit to do. Spread it out. Host your own.
This is of course ignoring that corporate executive pay is insane and you could definitely cut that in half, but we don't. We pass the costs of the fifth execute yacht to the consumers, and here we have like 5 people defending that structure as if it just has to be that way. It doesn't. It wasn't like that before Google started owning everything.
And yes, for the record, I am not using YouTube. YouTube currently barely works on my browser so I just don't use it.
And if you were streaming the volume of videos they are, your costs would be astronomical too. Your argument is completely senseless.
What he's saying is there are alternative methods that cost less, theres a few youtube competitors that use p2p for instance, which'd cut down on hosting costs SIGNIFICANTLY
And you are still missing what I am saying. I don't care if it's P2P or not. If he is personally sending out TB's of data from his server everyday, being P2P means nothing. If TB's of data are leaving his server, then he will have an exponential cost growth to be able to send TB's of data. You're not making an apples to apples comparison. Sending TB's of data a month, let alone a day has an enormous cost to it. There is no avoiding that.
And he is arguing they are eating costs they dont have to eat, that they are CHOOSING to eat
Do you know the enormous amount of data it takes to stream video? And how much infrastructure to have such seamless loading as youtube does, caching copies of popular videos all across the world?