There used to be a free youtube before google? Someone has to volunteer to pay for the site servers unless you pay them my ignorant bro. Youre always free to stop using the evil corporation sites but you want their stuff for free instead and complain about it. Get a grip
Youre the one begging them for free content here, stuff costs money get a job bum
How are they supposed to pay for the infrastructure that you’re using to watch it. Do you even have a clue what it costs to run YouTube for a month? The ads keep the servers up. BTW it’s in the tens of millions a month if not more to run YouTube.
I literally don’t have a job and host a website with 249971 requests served april-october. This shit isn’t expensive, google makes it expensive. Before YouTube we just had other websites with videos.
e: I got it wrong, it’s 525154 (valid) requests april-october with 85340 unique IPs after filtering my own.
Requests cost nothing, data storage and bandwidth usage do.
People upload over 500 hours of videos every minute, that’s 256.320.000hours each year. Let’s say that most of it is lower quality instead of 4K, so each hour takes 0.5GB of storage. That’s 128PB every year. Youtube overall size probably reached Exabytes in the last few years.
Their daily bandwidth usage probably ranges way into Petabytes too, something you were orders of magnitude away over the whole life cycle of your site.
No one has a clue what it ‘costs’ because YT isn’t honest about revenue, and being a subsidiary its P&L statements can be adjusted to spread any narrative around profitability it considers useful. In the context of Alphabet its operating cost is probably negligible.
You’re already paying them data tribute through daily interaction with much of the corporate web.
It was never free. It was paid for and used by universities and research institutions. There was no world wide web, just gopher, ftp, usenet, chat, telnet. Any kind of advertising was really frowned upon, it was basically treated like a library. But, there wasn’t a lot to do there.