YouTube's losses are unsustainable.

[Onkel Neal]

LINK: Do You Think Bandwidth Grows on Trees?

User-generated content may have changed the Internet, but sites like YouTube are suffocating under the costs of storing it.

Even though they've changed the way we live, sites that collect and share content produced by all of us haven't done the one thing many tech evangelists said they'd do—make a ton of money. Or, in many cases, any money.

Credit Suisse estimates that 375 million people around the world will play about 75 billion YouTube videos this year. To serve up all these streams, the company has to pay for a broadband connection capable of hurtling data at the equivalent of 30 million megabits-per-second—about 6 million times as fast as your home Internet connection. All this bandwidth costs Google $360 million a year, the analysts estimate.

YouTube isn't alone in Poor House 2.0. Yahoo bought the popular photo-sharing site Flickr in 2005, and though the service might be marginally profitable, it certainly hasn't added appreciably to Yahoo's bottom line. (Yahoo similarly doesn't break out Flickr's financials.) Facebook provides an even better example. The social network is running up a huge tab to store and serve up all the photos, videos, and other junk you stuff into your profile. Last year, TechCrunch reported that Facebook spends $1 million a month on electricity, $500,000 a month on bandwidth, and up to $2 million per week on new servers to keep up with its users' insatiable photo-uploading needs. (Members post nearly a billion photos every month.) But Facebook gets relatively little in return for storing all your memories. Ad rates on its network are terribly low, the company doesn't make a profit, and it hasn't shed any light on how it will make good on investments that valued the company at $15 billion.

Yeah, I've wondered how long these sites could manage to keep this up. Seriously, they encourage everyone to upload everything possible.... who the heck is paying for this?

For all the frenzy surrounding citizen-produced media, the content that seems to do best online is the same stuff that did well offline—content produced by professionals. My colleague Jack Shafer recently listed the many services that people are willing to pay for online. They include music from iTunes, game videos from MLB.TV, reviews from Consumer Reports, and articles from the Wall Street Journal—and nothing made on some dude's cell phone.

My interest in this, I've always been careful about biting off more than I can chew with Subsim (I was really burned with big bandwidth overage charges a few times in the past ) but over the last year or so, I concluded that we can sustain more services like the forum photo albums and the updated downloads section and still stay within the limit of our server contracts.

Of course, most of the stuff here is serious material, not something made on some dude's cell phone, lol.

Neal

[Zachstar]

The issue is how we have handled the growth of the net.

The reason it is costing so much is due to how much it takes to keep this old creaky backbone going. Its insanely complicated because it went from simple BBSs to Graphics to video to HD video in less than half a century.

People think this can continue forever and that is not the case and sadly only the government can provide the many billions needed to even put a dent in this issue.

We are on the verge of people using services like netflix to download HD movies for viewing at home. When this grows expect to see bandwidth costs explode because there is just no more supply to handle all this.

[XabbaRus]

Well I won't be sad to see the demise of Facebook and others like it. They don't seem to serve any purpose than for fashionable geekism.

Check out the irony. In the early days and I'm talking only 9 years ago when the net was mostly forums and websites for info anyone who spent time surfing the net was a geek etc and I'm pretty certain was looked down upon by the cool crowd. Now with Facebook, Bebo and MySpace you have all these people spending ages on these sites to leave messages for friends who they're going to the pub with later on. The same people who are glued to texting on the cell phone 24/7.

As long as subsim keeps going I'll be happy.

[Kapitan_Phillips]

This is all Boxxy's fault.

[Jimbuna]

I'm quite happy with my small home sever and SS and Google thanks.

[SteamWake]

Originally Posted by Kapitan_Phillips

This is all Boxxy's fault.

Its 4chans fault for letting the boxxy madness happen in the first place.

Ive never understood how sites like you tube, photobucket, and the like make money. I guess their main revenue stream is advertising.

[GoldenRivet]

government bailout

[longam]

How the hell did we ever start this bandwidth measuring anyway? When we all had modems they didn't scream because you spent all night DL'ing some huge file.

Whats next? Every network switch and router you buy going to have a meter in it and you have to pay for so many MB's you pass threw them? Just because the telco and cable companies upgraded the equipment to handle the load doesn't mean we have to keep paying for it over and over.

Corporate America just love's to find a way to squeeze a buck anyway they can. If they didn't come in with their bandwidth hog programs and websites we would still have what we need from the internet, INFORMATION!

[SteamWake]

Originally Posted by longam

Corporate America just love's to find a way to squeeze a buck anyway they can. If they didn't come in with their bandwidth hog programs and websites we would still have what we need from the internet, INFORMATION!

Yea ! Info like this !!!

Damn coporate greed.

[Arclight]

Holy crap, I couldn't stand watching more then 5 seconds of that video. What the heck is wrong with people?!

Time for the crap to go, back to basics. Would be sorry to see Photobucket go because I can't upload screenshots anymore... no big loss there.

[Skybird]

Nobody held a weapon at their sleeves to form up youtube. Too much crap there anyway, and too much repeating of one and the same stuff. sometimes it's fun and useful, but mostly it is - not needed at all. It's like with cellphone chatter. Just listen a bit to the kind of nonsens people send over cellphones while walking in town. "I must tell you that X has this new girl Y and now his former friend Z cried all day long." "Hi darling, I'm at the second crossroad now, I'm home in 5 minutes, bye." "And then I told that he can do you know what and what did he do? Nothing! It was as if he dad not listening!"

We communicate ourselves to death.

And with some people it's hard to imagine that to be a loss.

and the whole web seem to be a marketplace of narcissism. Everybody thinks to be so overly important that he must made himself heared in this poll, that reader's comment. And many seem to consider this to be some kind of basic damocracy. But it's just a polishing of vanities, a killing of time, a behavior of somebody bored to death.

[HunterICX]

Originally Posted by Skybird

We communicate ourselves to death.

Yet we only do that with the use of electronic devices, instead of communcating in person with one and another.

HunterICX

[goldorak]

Ok guys, lets close the internet and go back to bbs and usenet.

[Tchocky]

Well, this is surely as much to do with the downturn in advertising revenue as well as bandwidth costs. Advertising will raise money again, unfortunately the rather ropey model of internet advertising as it stands now is the first place to suffer under a general economic downturn.

Originally Posted by Kapitan_Phillips

This is all Boxxy's fault.

Nah, its clearly mudkips fault, everybody lieks him so much they forget to make money.