[varelaz]

I think as everywhere 90% of money Youtube gets from 3-10% of content. That looks like cost optimization. They spend money for requests (displaying video) and storage. Even if storage is 30% of their cost and they can remove 10% of biggest never displayed videos they can save 3% of overall costs, which is huge improvement on very concurrent market. Video ads right now the most expensive and most fast growing market.

[Retric]

I doubt storage of extremely unpopular videos is a significant cost for YT. Their revenue is ~25 billion per year. Assuming with redundancy they are paying say ~1,000$ per 8TB added per year. People are uploading 500+ Hours of video every minute. Assuming that’s mostly 30fps 4K video we are talking 50 Mbps * 60 * 500 * 1 year ~= 0.75 Billion per year or ~3.3% of revenues. (50 Mbps seems like an overly generous average.)

Not free, but cutting off say 10% of uploads to save ~0.3% is not going to help their bottom line much as they would lose out on some viral videos and future stars in the process. Plus, there are minimum view requirements before revenue sharing. Worse they could easily lose their spot as the default location for video uploads long term.

[joosters]

I think that kind of policy would have a bad effect on YouTube usage. Not everyone uses it to upload videos that they want to go viral or get lots of hits. Plenty of users are storing videos on there that are just for family and friends. The users who are uploading this other ~90% of 'small time' content aren't going to keep using a site that would routinely delete their content because it wasn't popular enough.