Because it’s the video platform, King.
By your logic, my website shouldn’t exist because it’s too expensive. By your logic, videos didn’t exist before YouTube. You are at odds with reality.
Wow your reading comprehension is astounding, ill try to use as few words as possible, more videos = more money needed to host them
Who was it that told you YouTube was so expensive to run? Google? I couldn’t imagine why the company, with a vested interest in making you think ads are essential, would tell you that YouTube is like super duper totally expensive.
Please explain to me how it is that my website, despite serving lossless music and video streaming and a photogallery, doesn’t actually cost me anything except the electric bill which is so negligible that I don’t even bother considering it in my low-income no-job budget. I would love to hear why this isn’t possible.
I, too, remember the days before YouTube where videos literally did not exist on the internet! So innovative of Google, inventing video hosting.
Storage isn’t cheap
Network bandwidth isn’t cheap
Data centers aren’t cheap
Add on Electricity, Transcoding, Multiple AZs, Backups, cached content with ISPs and engineer salaries and you’ve got a very expensive system.
That’s not even factoring in payments to creators, which are necessary if you want people to make quality content for the platform.
Your website serves multiple orders of magnitude less traffic than a single YouTube page. Web costs aren’t linear. It’s an S-Curve where it’s incredibly cheap to get started, but gets exponentially more expensive until you’ve reached some level of critical mass where revenue exceeds costs.
Video hosting pre-YouTube was terrible. It barely existed, and it wasn’t accessible. They sure didn’t invent it, but they made it possible for the masses to host video.
No other web content platform has taken off since YouTube. There’s a reason for that, and the majority is cost. To reach a widespread audience you have to invest hundreds of millions into infrastructure. Same reason Twitch still has the critical mass of livestreamers.
I already covered those points in my previous comments: 500 hours uploaded per minute, more videos = more money needed to host them. I can’t dumb it down further, sorry