There's no guarantee creators can collect as much income without Google either. Google has proven they can get way more income from ads than pretty much everyone else, and even bug channels with sponsorships still derive a very large income portion from Google ads (based on what I've heard from LinusTechTips videos)
They limit you to 2TB per month of bandwidth:
* https://vimeo.com/upgrade-plan
If a video goes viral and you shoot past that you'll probably get a call from them.
You also have a finite amount of storage space available with them, which depends on the account tier you're at: no infinite storage like with Youtube. (And with 4K video nowadays, that can be burned through quickly.)
Genuinely curious, would you still go for it?
For Google? You think Google get a monthly bill for their bandwidth?
Whether 100TB or 1500TB of data are delivered to one ISP at one peering point in a given month has minimal effect, that 10Gbps, 100Gbps or larger port is a fixed cost that will exist regardless of traffic.
Conceivably an option for professionals with business models but hard to see it being a default for a service that wants traction.
Also let me opt-out of the algoritm.
I watch videos from my subscriptions in reverse chronological order and that’s it.
It seems the problem is, with YouTubes monopoly, other services have almost no chance to succeed because of the "Network Effect"...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebula_(streaming_service)
$100 wouldn't even cover the storage mate. Let's say you've got 2 thousand hours of content (smallest amount that qualifies for "thousands")
At 2k resolution, that'd be around 30TB And you'll want to preprocess it to 1080p, 720p, 480p, so add another 15tb for the other resolutions.
And YouTube supports 4k, so if you're shooting at that resolution, you can add another 50tb on top.
Purely storage you're already looking at a ~$2500 monthly bill.
And then you're gonna have to host and serve it to hundreds of thousands of viewers, the bandwidth cost is gonna be astronomical. Every 100 hours of streamed content is gonna be another ~$100 on top. With a 15 minute video, that'd be 400 views.
And I significantly rounded down on every calculation as this is napkin math. If you'd use AWS S3 pricing for storage and egress you can safely double my dollar numbers.
Even if it's a vtuber/live streamer they'd still have to publish ~6 hours every day for a full year to get to 2 thousand hours
It's pretty much the peak of the iceberg
$100/month for 50TB probably isn't feasible but start compromising on resolution and something could be made to work.
Unless you want to be completely capped and unable to ever publish again you're gonna have to add at least a few TB (+10TB, 120TB total) and then you'll need a secondary storage for backup, so another 60 TB, 180TB total
At $320 per 16TB disk that can handle being active 24/7 (actually only ~14 TB usable, but let's ignore that) you're left with $3750 at the very least, ignoring that you'll have to continuously replace them, electricity is also pretty expensive with HDDs. House them in a server etc
You too are wildly off with your math, as I'm literally flooring every calculation. Realistic estimates by a professional are gonna be _way_ higher, especially because this kind of storage doesn't have the iops to serve video to multiple consumers. It'd be at best a NAS that can serve to maybe 2-4 ppl at a time
But your calculations are for a different problem. You're not solving for "what is the best I can do for $100". You're solving for "what do I need to clone Google's infrastructure for thousands of hours of video footage".
Eg, you doubled the amount of storage space to avoid rebuilding RAIDs when a disk goes down. There is an obvious alternative - don't do that, let the RAID go down and rebuild it while eating the downtime. That sort of thing isn't a big deal for discount video hosting. Maybe even force people to keep their own backups.
So yes, I'm basing my calculations on YouTubes service. What you're imagining is obviously an option for individuals that only want to serve to few individuals at a time, but is entirely offtopic to what was proposed here
He suggested $100/month for 300 videos and noted that he was experienced in content creating.
Literally the the first paragraph
He didn't actually say or imply what you think he did. In fact a later part of the comment ("10/month? That's 30 videos in HD max. $100? 300 videos in 4K... etc. ... or whatever.") clarifies that he meant what he wrote and it is something quite different to what you're picking out.
My point from the beginning was that $100/month is not enough to host a successful channel on YouTube. You absolutely can do it on vimeo, self hosted jellyfin or similar. Plenty of options around. It just get extremely expensive if you're serving content to hundreds of thousands or even millions of viewers.
You can probably start at $10/month with a hetzner shared instance and 1tb storage and unmetered 1 Gigabit Ethernet. Gonna be fine for ~2 simultaneous viewers
I only addressed the storage first because his idea was so far outside of a realistic price. Storage cost is a rounding error on the invoice if you're serving videos to consumers with views as a semi successful YouTube channel gets
I think that is still overcooking it. Peertube has a FAQ on the subject [0], going off that it's probably achievable to have 1,000 concurrent users at ~$50/month+storage. Not commercially advisable, it is pretty obvious that everyone in the game ends up going ad-supported and that makes sense to me. But YouTube could in support something like that for small channels without too much trouble. The issue here for the median channel case doesn't look like costs in the >$1,000/month range as much as foregone revenue and operational complexity. The vast majority of content creators don't get hundreds of thousands of views.
[0] https://joinpeertube.org/faq#should-i-have-a-big-server-to-r...
Why is running ads the _only_ choice? Why can't a creator opt to pay to host videos on their channel with limitations? $10/month? That's 30 videos in HD max. $100? 300 videos in 4K... etc. ... or whatever.
As a content creator with seven years experience, hundreds of videos and thousands of hours of content: I use Freetube. Please use it until abusive adverts and practices aren't a thing anymore.