HGeneAnthony Posted January 22, 2008 Share Posted January 22, 2008 I was wondering how do video sites like youtube manage to pay for the bandwidth costs that it must have let a lone make a profit. I don't see a ton of advertising on the site. I'm interested in adding video to my site but my issue is bandwidth. Are there tricks these sites use to drop their bandwidth consumption down a lot? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
revraz Posted January 22, 2008 Share Posted January 22, 2008 Look who owns it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Daniel0 Posted January 22, 2008 Share Posted January 22, 2008 Look who owns it. Yeah, but YouTube earns money for Google. Otherwise they wouldn't have bought it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HGeneAnthony Posted January 22, 2008 Author Share Posted January 22, 2008 Look who owns it. They didn't always own it. Google bought them for something like a billion. I can't figure out how they make a profit though and why Google would want them. Anyone else got any idea? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Warptweet Posted January 24, 2008 Share Posted January 24, 2008 They own their own servers, thus bandwidth does not apply to them. Bandwidth does not actually exist -- it is a method which web hosts use to limit the amount of usage of their servers a single customer can have -- for multiple reasons too, including the prevention of people refreshing their customers pages constantly and making tons of stress on their servers. Web hosts have hundreds of customers sometimes on a single server, too much stress means hundreds of customers completely out of it. However owning your own servers means that bandwidth is not your problem, it doesn't exist anymore -- it's simply your servers overloading from the gergillions of visitors and streamers that youtube gets. Any computer, even yours can be a server. You don't see yourself having bandwidth when you browse the internet, do you? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Daniel0 Posted January 24, 2008 Share Posted January 24, 2008 Uh, yes... bandwidth does exist. There is a physical limit to how much data the equipment (routers, switches, network cards) and the cables can transfer. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
s0c0 Posted January 24, 2008 Share Posted January 24, 2008 They own their own servers, thus bandwidth does not apply to them. Bandwidth does not actually exist -- it is a method which web hosts use to limit the amount of usage of their servers a single customer can have -- for multiple reasons too, including the prevention of people refreshing their customers pages constantly and making tons of stress on their servers. Web hosts have hundreds of customers sometimes on a single server, too much stress means hundreds of customers completely out of it. However owning your own servers means that bandwidth is not your problem, it doesn't exist anymore -- it's simply your servers overloading from the gergillions of visitors and streamers that youtube gets. Any computer, even yours can be a server. You don't see yourself having bandwidth when you browse the internet, do you? Excuse me but you don't understand the first thing about bandwidth. Bandwidth is in fact a finite resource. If I operate a website that can transfer 1.5 Mbps, but users are requesting 10 Mbps from me cause I'm some hip media site then it will take much longer for the user to receive the data they've requested. Owning your own server has nothing to do with bandwidth. Yes I have a degree in computer network systems, but it doesn't take a degree or 4 years in I/T to know this. Sorry if I came off like an ass, which I bet I did. I'm not sure how youtube makes money.... I never click on those damn ads, they must make money off impressions too, which even if its only a half cent per impression is a lot of money with the amount of hits they get! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
s0c0 Posted January 24, 2008 Share Posted January 24, 2008 Uh, yes... bandwidth does exist. There is a physical limit to how much data the equipment (routers, switches, network cards) and the cables can transfer. Quoted for truth! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
steelmanronald06 Posted January 24, 2008 Share Posted January 24, 2008 On the front page of youtube.com there is a small ad on the far right, scrolled down some. It is hard to see, you kinda gotta look for it, but if it is a google ad (i assume it is) and it is pay-per-impression, can you imagine how many people see that ad PER DAY?! Just clicking around I can see ads on Youtube...their not very stand-outish but they exist. You have to actually be looking for them to find them...that might explain some of their profit. I see a large ad here, though: http://youtube.com/community Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
emehrkay Posted January 24, 2008 Share Posted January 24, 2008 Look who owns it. Yeah, but YouTube earns money for Google. Otherwise they wouldn't have bought it. Ehhh I'm not so sure about that. You have to think about what YouTube means to Google and how it fits into their overall goal of providing services for free (ad supported) and being the hub for everything on the internet. Google bought youtube because it is the biggest video site on the net - it is worth the losses. And we could further get into how how youtube has been able to basically win any lawsuit brought to the table over copyrighted materials and the agreements reached with the copyright holders. That creates the "hey you worked with us over here, check us out on this front" conversation. You gotta remember youtube disrupted copyright policies that are seen in all areas by using the DMCA against the big guys - that is valuable. I do feel that they are making strides to better monetize the service. The videos now have ads embedded into them allowing ad space to reach far beyond the youtube domain. So that now when people embed them in their websites, youtube is still being paid for providing the video and player etc. I have no idea how much it costs to host and provide bandwidth for all of those videos, but like steelman said, there are a lot of opportunities for ads to be seen and that money is filtered right back. So now almost every site has a google adsense ad and to top it off, embedded google-owned video. I'm sure they dont mind youtube not having any positive cashflow (if they didnt). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Warptweet Posted January 25, 2008 Share Posted January 25, 2008 Uh, yes... bandwidth does exist. There is a physical limit to how much data the equipment (routers, switches, network cards) and the cables can transfer. At a time, yes. Although if theres only one person viewing my site, and they request a page, after they finish loading the page my router/card etc. is no longer under anystress. By bandwidth, I beleive you are referring to the maximum transfer rate, often 10/100MBps. We hosts monitor this in total monthly -- which is simply their marketing scheme. I do my own servers on my own computers for test websites and sometimes massive undergoing projects, bandwidth is not a monthly-wise limitation, only over a matter of seconds. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheFilmGod Posted January 26, 2008 Share Posted January 26, 2008 Excuse me but you don't understand the first thing about bandwidth. Bandwidth is in fact a finite resource. If I operate a website that can transfer 1.5 Mbps, but users are requesting 10 Mbps from me cause I'm some hip media site then it will take much longer for the user to receive the data they've requested. Owning your own server has nothing to do with bandwidth. Yes I have a degree in computer network systems, but it doesn't take a degree or 4 years in I/T to know this. Sorry if I came off like an ass, which I bet I did. I'm not sure how youtube makes money.... I never click on those damn ads, they must make money off impressions too, which even if its only a half cent per impression is a lot of money with the amount of hits they get! Bandwidth doesn't exist, data transfer speed/rate exist. Bandwidth, as was mentioned before, it is simply used to calculate server usage. If you have a good for nothing person trying to create their own website and don't even know what HTML is, how do you expect the company to explain to the person that his server could only take 10 mbps? It's easier just to say 100,000 gb transfer each month.... they probably wouldn't understand that anyway... Hosting youtube doesn't cost any money for google. They already have servers connected to the fiberoptic backbone - this is a huge intial investment, but once it is made you have unlimited bandwidth and VERY high data transfer rate. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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