• merc@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      It was never free. It was paid for and used by universities and research institutions. There was no world wide web, just gopher, ftp, usenet, chat, telnet. Any kind of advertising was really frowned upon, it was basically treated like a library. But, there wasn’t a lot to do there.

    • bemenaker@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      How are they supposed to pay for the infrastructure that you’re using to watch it. Do you even have a clue what it costs to run YouTube for a month? The ads keep the servers up. BTW it’s in the tens of millions a month if not more to run YouTube.

      • fosstulate@iusearchlinux.fyi
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        1 year ago

        No one has a clue what it ‘costs’ because YT isn’t honest about revenue, and being a subsidiary its P&L statements can be adjusted to spread any narrative around profitability it considers useful. In the context of Alphabet its operating cost is probably negligible.

        You’re already paying them data tribute through daily interaction with much of the corporate web.

        • Jako301@feddit.de
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          1 year ago

          Requests cost nothing, data storage and bandwidth usage do.

          People upload over 500 hours of videos every minute, that’s 256.320.000hours each year. Let’s say that most of it is lower quality instead of 4K, so each hour takes 0.5GB of storage. That’s 128PB every year. Youtube overall size probably reached Exabytes in the last few years.

          Their daily bandwidth usage probably ranges way into Petabytes too, something you were orders of magnitude away over the whole life cycle of your site.

            • bemenaker@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              And if you were streaming the volume of videos they are, your costs would be astronomical too. Your argument is completely senseless.

              • Kedly@lemm.ee
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                1 year ago

                What he’s saying is there are alternative methods that cost less, theres a few youtube competitors that use p2p for instance, which’d cut down on hosting costs SIGNIFICANTLY

                • bemenaker@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  And you are still missing what I am saying. I don’t care if it’s P2P or not. If he is personally sending out TB’s of data from his server everyday, being P2P means nothing. If TB’s of data are leaving his server, then he will have an exponential cost growth to be able to send TB’s of data. You’re not making an apples to apples comparison. Sending TB’s of data a month, let alone a day has an enormous cost to it. There is no avoiding that.

                  • Kedly@lemm.ee
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                    1 year ago

                    And he is arguing they are eating costs they dont have to eat, that they are CHOOSING to eat

        • filcuk@lemmy.zip
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          1 year ago

          Do you know the enormous amount of data it takes to stream video? And how much infrastructure to have such seamless loading as youtube does, caching copies of popular videos all across the world?

    • King@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      There used to be a free youtube before google? Someone has to volunteer to pay for the site servers unless you pay them my ignorant bro. Youre always free to stop using the evil corporation sites but you want their stuff for free instead and complain about it. Get a grip