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People complain a lot about Youtube ads and how awful they are but as a thought experiment I once tried to imagine the amount of storage and bandwidth Youtube m

• paulpauper 4y ago
  google and YouTube generate insane profits. they could show fewer ads and it would not impair the functionality of YouTube
  • elzbardico 4y ago
    Who gets to decide what is an "insane" profit? You?
    • paulpauper 4y ago
      Re-read the post. They could afford to run fewer ads. Right now, google is optimizing for profits at the possible cost of user experience, which may hurt google long-term. It's their right to do that, but I think it's a poor idea in the long term.
    • ASalazarMX 4y ago
      The Market(TM)
    • BaseballPhysics 4y ago
      Given that Alphabet still refuses to release profit numbers for Youtube, right now, no one but Alphabet. And given the context of this conversation is about ads, dark patterns, and more broadly, privacy, I think it's perfectly reasonable that we have that conversation.
    • Teever 4y ago
      Regulators. And since the US seems to have abrogated those responsibilities they are falling to the EU.
      • scarface74 4y ago
        So you want regulators to decide how much of a profit corporations should have for a non essential service like watching videos?
        • Teever 4y ago
          "So you want regulators to decide how much of a profit corporations should have for a non essential service like smoking cigarettes? Yes I want regulators to dictate how a behemoth corporate entity like Alphabet uses a platform like Youtube in ways that they both unduly profit from and are unacceptably detrimental to society as a whole. Entities like Alphabet continue to grow and grow and the corrosive effects of their growth need to be checked some how. If you don't advocate for regulation than what mechanisms are you anticipating will mitigate the negative aspects of these kinds of entities?
          • scarface74 4y ago
            And the government still allows you to smoke cigarettes. Just like if you don’t want to risk getting cancer by smoking you don’t smoke. If you don’t like the shit show that is YouTube - don’t use YouTube.
  • pc86 4y ago
    Google might. But does YouTube? Should other Google properties subsidize YouTube if it doesn't generate "insane profits" by whatever metric you're using that word?
    • edgyquant 4y ago
      YouTube is the largest social media site (or at least was a couple of years ago.) Google gets a lot more value than just cash out of it, otherwise they’d have shut it down.
      • scarface74 4y ago
        What value does Google get out of YouTube besides the minuscule profit?
        • edgyquant 4y ago
          Having complete control over the vast majority of internet video content
          • scarface74 4y ago
            There is nothing stopping content producers from hosting their own content on something like S3+CloudFront or the cheaper (than AWS) alternatives.
            • spixy 4y ago
              and yet they are not doing it
              • scarface74 4y ago
                And thus you are stuck with crappy public cable access channel style content…
        • _Algernon_ 4y ago
  • ufmace 4y ago
    If they're really generating "insane profits", how do I invest in them and get myself a chunk of those "insane profits"?
    • Retric 4y ago
      Get a time machine. Those profits are already baked into the stock price.
• ohyoutravel 4y ago
  I’m not seeing the connection you’re making between the admitted marvel of engineering at scale and ads.
  • geodel 4y ago
    Well wouldn't it be just recouping cost to run engineering infrastructure and hence ads.
  • elzbardico 4y ago
    It costs money. Plain and simple.
  • tenebrisalietum 4y ago
    The ads pay for the marvel.
  • gonzo41 4y ago
    You have to pay for it somehow, the adds are probably a fair price.
  • wppick 4y ago
    There is no free lunch I think is his point. Also, I think youtube allows you to pay to have an ad free experience
    • ohyoutravel 4y ago
      That connection was implied, but not explicit. Just wanted to make sure I was drawing the right inference. I guess my thought would be that there are plenty of ad-free business models that would allow this content without (explicit playing before and during content) ads. It’s also my experience that there are still ads with their paid service, which is why I stopped paying for it. I would happily pay for a YouTube ad-free experience. Some other user mentioned that there “was no free lunch” but explicit ads before and during videos don’t have to be the payment for said lunch.
  • gzer0 4y ago
    more than 500 hours of video content on average is uploaded every minute to the platform [1]. Not sure what standard you are using for 'marvel of engineering' but to me this is truly a marvel of engineering. [1] https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/new-era-video-infrastructure/ https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/new-era-video-infrastruc...
• gonzo41 4y ago
  I often feel that the 90's child me would slap me across the face in disgust at how casually I take for granted the age of magic we live in now.
  • pc86 4y ago
    I distinctly remember waiting an appreciable amount of time to download a single Metallica mp3 on dialup as a middle schooler - maybe 20, 25 minutes? for a ~3 minute song - and a 2GB Linux distro took me like 30 seconds a few weeks ago. I'm simultaneously hopeful for what we'll be doing 20, 30 years from now, but also worried that the rate of progress is slowing (because I am by definition comparing now to the very very early days of the modern internet).
    • cecilpl2 4y ago
      I used to download full video game soundtracks. It would take me all night to download a single album, and I'd have been disconnected from the internet when I woke up in the morning because my ISP wouldn't support a connection length longer than 8 hours. We couldn't even stream music, let alone stream video.
      • crtasm 4y ago
        How long ago are you talking? Realplayer came out in 1995, I was listening to live DJs over my dialup connection in 1996.
        • everdrive 4y ago
          I never had a fast or consistent enough dial-up connection to stream audio. I tried multiple times, but it never worked for me. I'd get maybe 15-30 seconds of contiguous sound, and the whole thing would fail. I did download MP3s though. A 3mb MP3 file would usually take me approximately an hour. And I downloaded ~3,000 this way.
    • 83 4y ago
      We had a second phone line for dial up internet - I remember spending three weeks downloading a copy of Age of Empires (roughly 250mb), praying it wouldn't be corrupt or a bad file. It downloaded successfully, but to my dismay it was the expansion. Took me another month to get the actual game to download, at least at that point I had the expansion as well :)
• alex_young 4y ago
  What do you think a petabyte of storage costs? SSDs currently start at $15k / PB and presumably Google’s pricing at volume is better. Data transfer is priced by connection and not by bandwidth, so that cost will not scale linearly. https://diskprices.com/?locale=us&condition=new&disk_types=external_ssd,internal_ssd,m2_ssd,m2_nvme,u2 https://diskprices.com/?locale=us&condition=new&disk_types=e...
  • gberger 4y ago
    I don't think the $15/TB figure is accurate. The list drives are either unavailable on Amazon, or they are external drives which would be unsuitable for a data center. I think we're looking at $75/TB on the lower end.
  • zamadatix 4y ago
    Even the Amazon comments know that's a scam (well that and unavailable to actually purchase) and there is a reason the next disk in the list is 5x the price: > A 2T SSD for $38 sound to good to be true and of course they are a scam, don't buy they don't work But that's not even the biggest oversight here on storage, these drives also need to be attached to something which will need to be cooled, networked, and powered in a reliable enough way the service continues operating when you have 10s of thousands of these. You'll also need to store more than exactly the amount of data since you can't just lose videos any time there is a failure. In all it's still going to be dwarfed by encoding and bandwidth costs but that doesn't mean 15k/PB is any less an order of magnitude or two off on storage costs.
    • alex_young 4y ago
      I'm really sorry I posted a price I found on a simple Google search. Let's say you're right and SSDs are actually $150/TB. Now our 1 PB is still just $150k. Not even a fraction of revenue worth worrying about.
      • zamadatix 4y ago
        If the question was "how much would it cost to buy 1 PB worth of consumer grade SSDs" $150k sounds like a great answer. Going on the 1 PB/day Number that's ~$55M/year for some raw disk. Add another order of magnitude for needing more than just a raw disk to store 1 PB/day, as already explained, and that's ~500M/year on storage related costs. If you're hellbent on saying this half billion/year doesn't matter because the bandwidth cost (which is not paid per connection btw) would be much larger then sure but it's still unrelated to the cost of a standalone consumer SSD.
• shantnutiwari 4y ago
  >People complain a lot about Youtube ads and how awful they are but as a thought experiment I once tried to imagine the amount of storage and bandwidth Youtube must need everyday to operate. There was a post here about how Vimeo is charging people $300+/month for their videos-- and someone did the math to show thats just the hosting/bandwidth costs. For one creator. Youtube has millions of videos-- Im surprised their costs aren't higher. Im grateful they provide this service for free at all
  • Aissen 4y ago
    What costs are you using ? Because cloud costs are definitely outrageous, and definitely not what an at-scale operation like Vimeo or YouTube is paying.
    • edgyquant 4y ago
      Especially a place like YouTube that is vertically integrated with their cloud provider.
• lbriner 4y ago
  I do wonder whether another approach would be starting to delete old videos with not many clicks unless you pay. This would seem to reduce storage bandwidth but I suppose they still have to support the insane amount of uploads! Another thing would be if you upload stupid crap that no-one wants to watch, you get banned or sent a nasty letter or something...I don't know, I don't work in customer retention ;-)
  • scarface74 4y ago
    Storage is cheap at scale. Bandwidth isn’t.
    • iforgotpassword 4y ago
      But is it at YouTube scale? I just tried it, I can click 10 years old videos with ~10 views and it starts playing after 3 seconds. How does that work? How can you have ever video ever uploaded on hot storage? What kind of storage are they using? Flash is probably too expensive, even if it has higher density than spinning disks by today. So was that video on a spinning disk? Then it also didn't seem to have been some spun down disk, because it should have taken more than three seconds then. It just boggles my mind that every video ever uploaded to YouTube is ready to be accessed instantly. You think anything that hasn't been accessed in a few years should be tugged away on some tape somewhere and needs a minute or two to start playing
  • dylan604 4y ago
    >I do wonder whether another approach would be starting to delete old videos with not many clicks unless you pay You click to view a video like this, but instead receive a message that states, please return in up to 2 hours while we fetch this content from cold storage. It'll help ensure you don't ever need to retrieve that content, the content is technically still available, but as the host you can start to whittle down online storage needs. Edit: Or, you can have the viewer pay for the rush to retrieve the content from cold storage with a viewer-pays model
• qbrass 4y ago
  You've certainly made a case for watching ads while uploading video.
• scarface74 4y ago
  And all reports are that YouTube is still barely break even…
  • q-big 4y ago
    > And all reports are that YouTube is still barely break even… A company can often tweak business metrics to give the message that the company wants the world to believe.
    • scarface74 4y ago
      So why would a company want to “tweak” metrics showing a business unit that’s over a decade old not making any money?
      • q-big 4y ago
        At least in Germany, there does exist a movement (YouTubers Union) that demands that YouTube should pay more to the creators. YouTube, on the other hand, denies that it makes money. So the question whether YouTube does make money or not is a highly politicized one in the German area. German Wikipedia on YouTubers Union: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youtubers_Union https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youtubers_Union Website: https://youtubersunion.org/ https://youtubersunion.org/
• sixothree 4y ago
  This kind of thinking is really disappointing to me. It's the same mindset that caused so many people to migrate to GMail in the first place. When GMail was introduced, google was offering a gigabyte of storage when most providers were offering a 1/10th or less of that. Many people gladly gave up access to the contents of their email in exchange for something that seemed at the time to be technologically impressive. As of today a few gigabytes of email storage seems fairly trivial. But we still gave up a lot to enjoy that privilege. Trust me, in 10 years this impressive amount of data will be less impressive to you.
• akhmatova 4y ago
  "I marvel at this feat of engineering, but Google's shady business practices creep me out" is how I would put it.