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At a recent startup I was helping with we had a video and image service. We utilized the video storage from both youtube and vimeo rather than hosting it oursel

At a recent startup I was helping with we had a video and image service. We utilized the video storage from both youtube and vimeo rather than hosting it ourselves. The application itself was more in line with a Vine or Periscope (in fact, a lot like Periscope). As part of our agreement with youtube and vimeo we had to handle some video processing. We had about 300,000 users, spread across just about every continent. We ran 12 front end web servers, 10 processing servers, a mongo cluster, used s3 storage, and Amazon CloudFront for CDN. Our bill for those 300,000 users was about $12,000 a month. Again, we did not actually STORE the videos, we allows youtube and vimeo to do that. The price also did not scale as one might imagine. The more users you have the higher the cost per user gets. This is because the more users you have, the more traffic you seem to get to each video and so bandwidth, which was by far the highest cost, would go up quite a lot.

dragonbonheur 11y ago
Thanks for replying. Was it possible for you to monetize the videos as you saw fit? Were you allowed to place your own ads with them? Or strip Youtube's ads and place your own in the metadata? Or did you have another way to monetize?
- trcollinson 11y ago
  Well yes and no. That is a very complex question and one that might be better for an actual conversation. Youtube and Vimeo want to make money. They don't take kindly to you hitting their revenue streams which are, generally, ads. However, they do work with people very well, though it is slow and bureaucratic. So to give you the simple answers: Was it possible for you to monetize the videos as you saw fit? Hell no. But it was possible for us to monetize the videos. Were you allowed to place your own ads with them? Yes Or strip Youtube's ads and place your own in the metadata? We worked with them to accomplish something like this yes. Or did you have another way to monetize? Yes, this too :) We made a bit of money on this system we built and it was more or less self sustaining. The issue was that it actually wasn't that profitable. We had another product which was almost like a little helper we made internally for ourselves that turned out to be a TON more lucrative so we gave up on the video and image network and eventually shut it down. Sometimes you have to just know when to fold them.
  - dragonbonheur 11y ago
    Wow. That was a great and helpful answer. Thanks again.

dragonbonheur 11y ago

Thanks for replying. Was it possible for you to monetize the videos as you saw fit? Were you allowed to place your own ads with them? Or strip Youtube's ads and place your own in the metadata? Or did you have another way to monetize?

trcollinson 11y ago
Well yes and no. That is a very complex question and one that might be better for an actual conversation. Youtube and Vimeo want to make money. They don't take kindly to you hitting their revenue streams which are, generally, ads. However, they do work with people very well, though it is slow and bureaucratic. So to give you the simple answers: Was it possible for you to monetize the videos as you saw fit? Hell no. But it was possible for us to monetize the videos. Were you allowed to place your own ads with them? Yes Or strip Youtube's ads and place your own in the metadata? We worked with them to accomplish something like this yes. Or did you have another way to monetize? Yes, this too :) We made a bit of money on this system we built and it was more or less self sustaining. The issue was that it actually wasn't that profitable. We had another product which was almost like a little helper we made internally for ourselves that turned out to be a TON more lucrative so we gave up on the video and image network and eventually shut it down. Sometimes you have to just know when to fold them.
- dragonbonheur 11y ago
  Wow. That was a great and helpful answer. Thanks again.