Silly Question for Cal3e or who ever......

[ninjageek 27]

This is a completely silly question. How do they store ALL that video you find on youtube?? How can they offer all that content for free?? I mean they have to have a TON of band width usage??

[CA3LE 1,145]

Advertising baby!

Bandwidth is cheap compared to what people pay for a slice of attention.

How do you think TestMy.net has survived for so long without ever charging anyone? As long as people keep supporting my advertisers, I don't care how much bandwidth they draw. YouTube has massive bandwidth needs... but is also massively supported by advertising.

Another thing to consider. YouTube, is owned by Google... Google created AdSense. People that post YouTube videos can link their AdSense account and earn a portion of the revenue from Google. So not only is bandwidth not a factor to them... they're making enough that they're willing to share profit... and give you the Lion's share. It pushes people to create higher quality content... Google is truly smart.

... Oh and how they store it. A lot of servers... across the globe. And a lot of memory.

[ninjageek 27]

How big would a "server" be?? Use small words, While I get computers, the rest I am pretty clueless on. You said advertising helps pay for it all. With most browsers now using "ad blockers" how can advertising even be viable?

[TriRan 160]

Actually the majority doesn't use ad blockers you will find a good percentage of people who don't even know what adblockplus is and for the server its not one giant server but clusters of servers I'd imagine Google runs thousands of servers a crossed the globe to serve all of its content