They don't deserve my subscription, their ads are too annoying and intrusive. Seriously, a 20 minute video can contain 6 midrolls. I recently tried to watch some video about how singapore is the only succesful dictatorship and instead it kept getting interrupted mid-sentence.

At this point I am fully convinced even cable tv has a better signal to noise ratio.

What are the costs involved in hosting for a single 10 minute 720p video?

Assuming it's 50MB compressed, about 0.1c per month to store it, 0.4c per view for bandwidth, plus cpu cost to stream it(unsure of how much this costs), plus transcoding costs on upload.(based on gcp storage costs)

Then there's also the non-dollar cost of the access to the very sizeable YouTube audience that google curates.

Comparing the cost of the actual hosting is silly though. Nobody thinks the value of hosting the nyt cooking site comes from the engineering behind the website, it comes from the content stored. The exact same. Thing is true here, the value of your video being on youtube is it being in a storefront.

...and then all the complexity starts. You really want to store many transcodes, and send a transcode appropriate for the combination of device and bandwidth. No point wasting money on bandwidth sending a 4k video to a small smartphone on a dicey mobile connection, after all.

Is the video served from some datacenter in Germany, no matter where the user is? You can cut bandwidth costs and improve latency by caching videos closer to the users, at the cost of handling all of the caching complexity and business arrangements.

If video 6-of-15 in the tutorial series suddenly goes viral, are you on the hook for outlandish bandwidth charges, or does your site hit a quota and just die?

Overall, it's VERY understandable that businesses outsource the complexity of video hosting, based on the engineering complexity alone.

> about 0.1c per month to store it, > 0.4c per view for bandwidth

No. Those estimates are 1 order of magnitude wrong. You wouldnt even pay that much contracting the highest tiers in AWS/Azure/GC , let alone owning the infrastructure.

Those estimates are taken from the gcp pricing page [0] that say $0.02 (or 2c) per GB. Have you a source for your claim that I'm wrong?

[0] https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing#price-tables

You are correct, I must have made a dumb mistake in my mental calculations