The best number I could find is that over 500 hours of video are uploaded every minute. That’s 720,000 hours of video uploaded per day or 263 million hours per year.
At a modest estimate of around 1.5GB/hour for 1080p video (I think this is a very low estimate, since YouTube has much higher quality available now, and also stores different versions of each video), this works out to 376PB per year!
Other factors to consider:
* Transcoding. YouTube servers are constantly transcoding video into many different formats, given a single input file.
* Serving. YouTube isn’t served from one central data centre. They operate a huge CDN in order to serve users at the edge of the network. This means some percentage of that 376PB figure must be duplicated many times across many different data centres.
And Alphabet's 2022 net income works out to $59 billion. Let's not pretend that YT is some struggling startup that could be bankrupted by cloud costs at any moment.
Back before the acquisition, YouTube was losing hundreds of millions of dollars. They were burning so much runway the company was essentially an all-in moonshot to get acquired by one of the big players (Google being the most likely buyer).
Since then, their costs have only grown and rather dramatically at that. They are far larger in terms of users and the videos far higher quality than they were back then.
So why do people continue expecting Google to subsidize YouTube and run it at a loss?
A nickel per minute / month if they want to get greedy about it.
I feel like the obvious starting point is to sort videos by whether they meet a view count threshold like 1000, and I would expect that to preserve internet history quite well.
I would love to see a breakdown of how many hours of video youtube is storing, sorted by how many digits the view count has.
Not disagreeing/agreeing with you but just want to point out that Alphabet Inc only publicizes Youtube's revenue and not the profit in their financial reports. So we as outsiders really can't say with 100% certainty whether Youtube is still losing money, or break-even, or profitable.
And if they are profitable this year (or recent years), does it make up for all the accumulated losses over multiple years since they acquired it in 2006? We don't have the raw internal numbers to calculate that.