• daniskarma@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Genuine question.

    How is been running for almost 20 years, most of them with very few ads?

    I doubt they had been just sinking money for the kind of their hearts.

    I do not know how much it cost to run a service like YouTube. Or how much money they make by ads or other ways. But they have been running for long enough to be a successful business.

    And it’s just the latest few years when they are pushing these aggressive techniques.

    • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
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      7 months ago

      How is been running for almost 20 years, most of them with very few ads?

      Investor money, then Google money. Video streaming requires fuckloads of storage and is a HUGE bandwidth hog, especially if people want to watch stuff at 1080p or higher resolutions. Youtube is a money pit, but it’s a major and nearly untouchable internet power, especially given its size and reach.

      And it’s just the latest few years when they are pushing these aggressive techniques.

      The “easy money” from loans with very low interest rates has dried up, also Google being Google.

      • Cargon@lemmy.ml
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        7 months ago

        There’s also the cost to transcode the video and audio streams into different formats so they don’t have to do it on demand whenever someone watches a video. That’s a lot of compute cost plus they have to store all of those additional transcodes which is more storage cost.