As soon as it gets split off from google and they no longer have the money machine to fund them and have to fight on a level regulatory-monitored ground for ad revenue you can bet your ass it will.
For every year that passes, storage becomes cheaper, but the total size of youtube's video repository grows. I wonder what the net effect of all that is in the end. Ever increasing costs? Or maybe it kinda evens out.
Interestingly, if storage cost decreases geometrically over time, then the total storage cost of storing a video for all eternity is finite.
Though what I was commenting on here wasn't so much the cost of storing a video at all, but storing it in 'warm' enough storage that you can load it really quickly.
Can you post your source? Last time I checked (and quickly checking around now) I didn't see any announcement from Google about Youtube being profitable.
It was already partially killed when in 2017 YouTube switched all unlisted videos to private.
Which I now just realize why they did that : a lot of people didn't understand the difference.
Sadly, a lot of other people did understand the difference, and did not expect this kind of switcheroo, and now there's a bunch of effectively dead links covering more than a decade of videos.
I got charged by Squarespace the other day, and it immediately raised red flags—I've never done business with them before.
Then it clicked: this was for an old domain I’d purchased through Google Domains. I knew Google had sold its domain business to Squarespace, but in the moment, I’d completely forgotten about it.
Anyone aware of public archives of videos like this? These are so cool and I imagine that in the future this would be an incredibly valuable peek into history given how raw it is.