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.
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
What if, and bare with me man I know this is complicated shit, you spread those out a little bit? You know, like it was before Google exterminated independent platforms? I promise you 490 hours of those 500 hours uploaded sits at 3 views for eternity.
YouTube was convenient and free before Google bought it, and that’s why we all congregated here. Google then used that power to entrench themselves and now it’s YouTube or nothing. If YouTube is too expensive to host, so be it. Let it die. It’s the internet, someone will make a better version that’s completely free. Peertube already exists and is scalable.
the 3 views dont matter youtube has to HOST it, STORE it somewhere, STORAGE costs money oh my god. Youtube was free when they didnt have to store 500 hours of video per minute and if you dont care if youtube dies why do you care if they ask for money, just dont use it?? and yes someone will make a free youtube and host 500 hours per minute for free I hope u dont actually believe this and youre trolling bro
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.