So long as storage costs decrease exponentially I think they'll keep everything.

Especially if the amount of content uploaded keeps going up, so the relative benefit of deleting old stuff is small.

> So long as storage costs decrease exponentially I think they'll keep everything.

I agree. That's why I've recently made a practice of backing up things to which I'd regret permanently losing access.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-comput...

Relatively recently they updated their policy. If you don't login to your account for two years they will delete everything. Source: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/12418290?hl=en

I have two accounts from my youth with mostly fansubs and "funny" vids. (A "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day"-Video that, 11 years after its upload, got band in Pakistan.) It includes two very successful (over 1M views combined) uploads of political TV shows. I will not log in to this this accounts. So this stuff will get deleted. So in the long run, stuff will disappear from YT.

I believe YouTube content was explicitly exempted from that deletion.

You seem to be right. This Google Blog post[1] says "we do not have plans to delete accounts with YouTube videos at this time."

[1] https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/updating-our-...

Would be nice if they would write that into the actual policy and don't just add a random sentence to a blog post.

If I remember right the original policy was to delete the YouTube videos and after pushback the YouTube exception was added.

You don’t need to keep everything “hot” all the time. Storage tiers exist for a reason.

Exactly! This was my go-to approach for reducing storage costs. Customers don't get spooked when they get an extra 1s delay for something they search once in a month. However, an extra 30ms delay in "everyday content" is a sure way to loose your users.

However, implementing this in practice is non-trivial. Knowing what is "everyday content" versus what is "once a month content".

To add more complexity -- you have these semi-predictable hype-waves especially two peaks in case of most YT videos where a "once-a-month" content becomes an "everyday" content before again becoming a "once-a-month" content. It feels you could specifically optimise for this -- reduce storage costs without sacrificing UX.

> To add more complexity -- you have these semi-predictable hype-waves especially two peaks in case of most YT videos where a "once-a-month" content becomes an "everyday" content before again becoming a "once-a-month" content.

Caching is hard but this sounds like an ARC would likely catch this, if it occurs on a small number of videos concurrently.

My 15 year old videos with 30 views still load nearly instantly. It’s as close to hot as hot is

Think about what you actually need to start a video. Maybe a dozen MB?

After that, you can plunge into colder storages and warm things up as you stream. Additionally, if you need longer to 'defrost' things, just cache a few more MB at the front. Cheat a bit by assuming 480p to start with if you need to; even less to store.

There is also location location location.

Maybe Google holds your content in 7 data centers round the world (~1 per continent for planned maintenance + latency + reduced oceanic fiber usage).

But with old rarely streamed content they might cut that down to just 3.

Speed/latency doesn't tell you much, because it's all on a hard drive somewhere.

The question is whether YT is serving up the one (redundantly-backed storage) copy they have of your almost-never-watched video, or whether it's serving it up from one of 1,000+ copies it's made across the globe for currently popular videos.

But they are tiny 480p files yeah?

That doesn't match my experience. I have some unlisted videos that I or a small handful of friends might go back and watch once a year, and it takes several seconds of loading before they start playing. It's very noticeably different from the near-instant loading of most videos I watch.

Old content has value for training AI models even if there are no human viewers anymore.

Yes, it's inevitable.

My guess is that the first step will be to re-encode all the non-popular videos with severe lossy compression.

They still keep the original uploaded files.

You know that because when they release a new format (eg. HDR or a different resolution), they re-encode from the original. Various people have tested that with moire patterns and various other ways to demonstrate if something was encoded more than once.

I had an entirely private channel with a couple hundred 1-3 hour long HD recordings of video conferences / screen shares. Entirely private as in every video was private, no one but me ever had access to them. Last year the channel was nuked and the account banned because I apparently broke their rule on “impersonation”. Seriously. I could file a dispute, but in typical Google fashion that dispute disappeared into the void. Thankfully the YouTube ban didn’t affect other aspects of that Google account, and didn’t spread to my other Google accounts. I was worried for a minute since I have another account with >10k subscribers, and while I don’t do monetization, it would suck to have that nuked as well.

I suspect that’s Google beginning to trim unprofitable channels using a lot of storage: delete them for bullshit reasons.