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How expensive is it to self-host videos nowadays? And are there any display ads providers that buy video advertising spots? Is it feasible to cobble together a

How expensive is it to self-host videos nowadays? And are there any display ads providers that buy video advertising spots? Is it feasible to cobble together a page that has your content and splices a few ads into the videos? Kind of like a modernized version of the WordPress+AdSense blogs everyone used to have.

phantomathkg 4y ago
Self hosted video vs self host streaming is two different things. You might have cheap S3 storage to tons tons of MP4 video, but to transcode it, add CDN and everything added up. Cloudflare pricing example is a good guide here. 6 dollar for storage, but egress fee is 72. https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/products/cloudflare-stream/ https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/products/cloudflare-stream/
- MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
  That seems surprisingly reasonable? It's saying $78/month for: >Streaming a library of 500 GB of HD videos over the course of one month with approximately 72,000 minutes of viewing time to a global market. And below is: >Streaming costs at a rate of $1 per 1,000 minutes delivered. So if you have tiktok style short videos of ~1 min, you only need a $1 CPM to break even.
iLoveOncall 4y ago
> How expensive is it to self-host videos nowadays? Insanely. If you take MrBeast's last video which is 200MB when downloaded in 1080p and has been viewed 40M times, we have 0.2GB * 40,000,000 = 20M GB of data transferred just for this one video. If you look at the price of AWS's CloudFront (a CDN) transfer out to the internet, it would cost $200,000 just to serve that video to the internet. This is just for pure data transfer. It's not viable even a second.
- dewey 4y ago
  I don't think "blowing up like MrBeast" is the scenario you should optimize for. If you would suddenly have traffic like MrBeast you'd also have sponsorships like MrBeast to pay for the traffic. On a regular scale fine to host videos if you are with a regular hoster and not pay AWS/GCP network prices. The problem is that you won't get traffic, you won't be discovered, you'd have to do a lot of things that you'll get for free on dedicated video platforms (transcoding, keeping a lot of different formats available to work with all devices,...)
  - iLoveOncall 4y ago
    > I don't think "blowing up like MrBeast" is the scenario you should optimize for. If you would suddenly have traffic like MrBeast you'd also have sponsorships like MrBeast to pay for the traffic. I'm sorry but this is just completely wrong. The price scales linearly, not exponentially, so it doesn't matter if you have 100,000 views or 40M, you will pay more in serving the video than anything you would earn on it. > On a regular scale fine to host videos if you are with a regular hoster and not pay AWS/GCP network prices. This is also wrong. If you are lucky your hosting provider will allow 1TB of transfer per month as fair use. That gets you a grand total of 5,000 views on that 200MB video we talked about. A 17 minutes, heavily compressed video. If your scope is bigger than sharing a video once in a while with your not-so-extended family, it will NOT be accommodated by a standard provider.
    - dewey 4y ago
      > If you are lucky your hosting provider will allow 1TB of transfer per month as fair use. Where did you get that from? That's very outdated information. Popular hosters in that kind of space: Hetzner (For a 90 Euro / month server): "In this special case, we will charge the usage over 20TB with € 1.19/TB" OVH: Even on a 20 Euro / month server you can push ~10TB / month easily without problems. Ask all the people hosting their seedboxes there.
- majou 4y ago
  Keep in mind 30 seconds watched counts as a view. Might buffer 3 minutes of video in that time, but hardly any of those views are the full video.
- baybal2 4y ago
mynameisvlad 4y ago
Your channel will die. Period. YouTube’s biggest feature is discovery. “The algorithm.” Sure, you might be able to self host videos, for relatively little money. But who is going to watch them? Alternatives like Floatplane, CuriosityStream, Nebula, etc all are great platforms and far more creator-friendly (mostly because they were built and owned by creators) but they all flounder when it comes to the discovery and hooking aspect because the amount of content on them is minuscule, and at the end of the day the viewer just goes back to YT.
LinuxBender 4y ago
A trend I've been seeing is people keeping popular but within-the-guidelines content on Youtube for discovery and monetization, then putting the outside-the-guidelines on their own sites. The heavy bandwidth stays on Youtube and the fringe groups can handle the semi-overloaded handful of VPS CDN-Less nodes. One can scale up/down caching/streaming nodes via most VPS provider API's and Cloud-init/Ansible. Anything with monetization will have to be within the guidelines of the provider or the advertisers will make the platform provider cancel the content regardless of platform.

phantomathkg 4y ago

Self hosted video vs self host streaming is two different things. You might have cheap S3 storage to tons tons of MP4 video, but to transcode it, add CDN and everything added up. Cloudflare pricing example is a good guide here. 6 dollar for storage, but egress fee is 72. https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/products/cloudflare-stream/ https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/products/cloudflare-stream/

MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
That seems surprisingly reasonable? It's saying $78/month for: >Streaming a library of 500 GB of HD videos over the course of one month with approximately 72,000 minutes of viewing time to a global market. And below is: >Streaming costs at a rate of $1 per 1,000 minutes delivered. So if you have tiktok style short videos of ~1 min, you only need a $1 CPM to break even.

iLoveOncall 4y ago

> How expensive is it to self-host videos nowadays? Insanely. If you take MrBeast's last video which is 200MB when downloaded in 1080p and has been viewed 40M times, we have 0.2GB * 40,000,000 = 20M GB of data transferred just for this one video. If you look at the price of AWS's CloudFront (a CDN) transfer out to the internet, it would cost $200,000 just to serve that video to the internet. This is just for pure data transfer. It's not viable even a second.

dewey 4y ago
I don't think "blowing up like MrBeast" is the scenario you should optimize for. If you would suddenly have traffic like MrBeast you'd also have sponsorships like MrBeast to pay for the traffic. On a regular scale fine to host videos if you are with a regular hoster and not pay AWS/GCP network prices. The problem is that you won't get traffic, you won't be discovered, you'd have to do a lot of things that you'll get for free on dedicated video platforms (transcoding, keeping a lot of different formats available to work with all devices,...)
- iLoveOncall 4y ago
  > I don't think "blowing up like MrBeast" is the scenario you should optimize for. If you would suddenly have traffic like MrBeast you'd also have sponsorships like MrBeast to pay for the traffic. I'm sorry but this is just completely wrong. The price scales linearly, not exponentially, so it doesn't matter if you have 100,000 views or 40M, you will pay more in serving the video than anything you would earn on it. > On a regular scale fine to host videos if you are with a regular hoster and not pay AWS/GCP network prices. This is also wrong. If you are lucky your hosting provider will allow 1TB of transfer per month as fair use. That gets you a grand total of 5,000 views on that 200MB video we talked about. A 17 minutes, heavily compressed video. If your scope is bigger than sharing a video once in a while with your not-so-extended family, it will NOT be accommodated by a standard provider.
  - dewey 4y ago
    > If you are lucky your hosting provider will allow 1TB of transfer per month as fair use. Where did you get that from? That's very outdated information. Popular hosters in that kind of space: Hetzner (For a 90 Euro / month server): "In this special case, we will charge the usage over 20TB with € 1.19/TB" OVH: Even on a 20 Euro / month server you can push ~10TB / month easily without problems. Ask all the people hosting their seedboxes there.
majou 4y ago
Keep in mind 30 seconds watched counts as a view. Might buffer 3 minutes of video in that time, but hardly any of those views are the full video.
baybal2 4y ago

mynameisvlad 4y ago

Your channel will die. Period. YouTube’s biggest feature is discovery. “The algorithm.” Sure, you might be able to self host videos, for relatively little money. But who is going to watch them? Alternatives like Floatplane, CuriosityStream, Nebula, etc all are great platforms and far more creator-friendly (mostly because they were built and owned by creators) but they all flounder when it comes to the discovery and hooking aspect because the amount of content on them is minuscule, and at the end of the day the viewer just goes back to YT.

LinuxBender 4y ago

A trend I've been seeing is people keeping popular but within-the-guidelines content on Youtube for discovery and monetization, then putting the outside-the-guidelines on their own sites. The heavy bandwidth stays on Youtube and the fringe groups can handle the semi-overloaded handful of VPS CDN-Less nodes. One can scale up/down caching/streaming nodes via most VPS provider API's and Cloud-init/Ansible. Anything with monetization will have to be within the guidelines of the provider or the advertisers will make the platform provider cancel the content regardless of platform.