All of the above costs money. A lot of money. So much money that only a shitty mega corporation with no moral scruples would ever be able to afford to run the platform, let alone turn a profit.
Some estimates put the total number of YouTube Videos around 500 million, and I’ll say each video takes 200MB to store every version. That’s only an extra $24 million a year. With back-end processing and other stuff I’ll bump that total up to $2.0 billion a year for hosting fees, if you were to run YouTube on AWS.
It’s cheaper than you think.
Some estimates put the total number of YouTube Videos around 500 million, and I’ll say each video takes 200MB to store every version. That’s only an extra $24 million a year. With back-end processing and other stuff I’ll bump that total up to $2.0 billion a year for hosting fees, if you were to run YouTube on AWS.