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> I'd argue Android's ecosystem and investment is > enormous compared to Youtube, and they take a smaller > cut from apps/in-app purchases than Youtube. Yo
by jmillikin 13y ago
> I'd argue Android's ecosystem and investment is
> enormous compared to Youtube, and they take a smaller
> cut from apps/in-app purchases than Youtube.
You can do some quick back-of-the-envelope calculations on the storage and bandwidth requirements of video and applications. It's very expensive to process, store, and serve video at YouTube's scale. See http://www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html http://www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html for some numbers.
> There's just something slimy about taking that much of
> a cut from someone's work. Its disgusting.
When media hosting sites take half of revenue, it's not out of sheer greed. Most of that money goes right into paying for bandwidth and compute to keep the service running. For example, iTunes Music is believed to have profit margins in the low single digits -- based on Apple's financial statements, it's barely break-even. Apple's App Store is much more profitable, despite taking only 30% of revenue.