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I find it fascinating how YouTube can afford to keep storing so much data, at the rate it comes in and especially when most if it is not valuable and may only b

I find it fascinating how YouTube can afford to keep storing so much data, at the rate it comes in and especially when most if it is not valuable and may only be watched a handful of times. A few years ago I looked up their profitability and came across an article claiming they were about breaking even bringing with about a billion dollars in revenue with about a billion in costs to run the service. If anyone has any recent / real insight into this I would be grateful for a link.

pizzapill 9y ago
I can give you a couple insights: 300 hours of video are uploaded to youtube every minute in 2018 A couple of years ago I've seen a Google talk with a youtube admin/engineer. He said that in the beginning they had huge issues because they could not order servers fast enough for the demand. Money seems to never have played a role in those decisions (I can't find the link to the talk anymore). If a video gets uploaded it will be stored in multiple resolutions and formats. So a video is probably stored as ~20 files which makes the space requirements even more mind boggling.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  > He said that in the beginning they had huge issues because they could not order servers fast enough for the demand. We had the exact same problems in the beginning of Camarades.com, before the wankers found out about it. It's amazing how for nearly 6 months it was just 'nice people' and after that it went downhill rapidly. We found out that hard way that 3 weeks lead time on a batch of servers only looks good if you don't double in size every two weeks or so :) One Dell server we ordered didn't even make it to production, it was way too small by the time it arrived so they took it back and shipped us a much larger one. That's also roughly around the time that we figured out that it is much cheaper to have one large server to do all the writes and a bunch of slaves that do all the reads from local copies. Of course a modern day server would laugh at serving up dynamic pages to a few hundred thousand people per day but in the late 90's that was quite a challenge.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    And these days i think Google builds their storage solutions from the board up. And i seem to recall reading about Facebook doing something similar (including experimenting with cold storage on burned blu-ray).
duskwuff 9y ago
> I find it fascinating how YouTube can afford to keep storing so much data, at the rate it comes in and especially when most if it is not valuable and may only be watched a handful of times. I spoke recently with an engineer at Youtube. He said that encoding and storage costs for algorithmically generated videos are a serious concern internally.

pizzapill 9y ago

I can give you a couple insights: 300 hours of video are uploaded to youtube every minute in 2018 A couple of years ago I've seen a Google talk with a youtube admin/engineer. He said that in the beginning they had huge issues because they could not order servers fast enough for the demand. Money seems to never have played a role in those decisions (I can't find the link to the talk anymore). If a video gets uploaded it will be stored in multiple resolutions and formats. So a video is probably stored as ~20 files which makes the space requirements even more mind boggling.

jacquesm 9y ago
> He said that in the beginning they had huge issues because they could not order servers fast enough for the demand. We had the exact same problems in the beginning of Camarades.com, before the wankers found out about it. It's amazing how for nearly 6 months it was just 'nice people' and after that it went downhill rapidly. We found out that hard way that 3 weeks lead time on a batch of servers only looks good if you don't double in size every two weeks or so :) One Dell server we ordered didn't even make it to production, it was way too small by the time it arrived so they took it back and shipped us a much larger one. That's also roughly around the time that we figured out that it is much cheaper to have one large server to do all the writes and a bunch of slaves that do all the reads from local copies. Of course a modern day server would laugh at serving up dynamic pages to a few hundred thousand people per day but in the late 90's that was quite a challenge.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  And these days i think Google builds their storage solutions from the board up. And i seem to recall reading about Facebook doing something similar (including experimenting with cold storage on burned blu-ray).

duskwuff 9y ago

> I find it fascinating how YouTube can afford to keep storing so much data, at the rate it comes in and especially when most if it is not valuable and may only be watched a handful of times. I spoke recently with an engineer at Youtube. He said that encoding and storage costs for algorithmically generated videos are a serious concern internally.