What are the costs involved in hosting for a single 10 minute 720p video?
Then there's also the non-dollar cost of the access to the very sizeable YouTube audience that google curates.
Comparing the cost of the actual hosting is silly though. Nobody thinks the value of hosting the nyt cooking site comes from the engineering behind the website, it comes from the content stored. The exact same. Thing is true here, the value of your video being on youtube is it being in a storefront.
Is the video served from some datacenter in Germany, no matter where the user is? You can cut bandwidth costs and improve latency by caching videos closer to the users, at the cost of handling all of the caching complexity and business arrangements.
If video 6-of-15 in the tutorial series suddenly goes viral, are you on the hook for outlandish bandwidth charges, or does your site hit a quota and just die?
Overall, it's VERY understandable that businesses outsource the complexity of video hosting, based on the engineering complexity alone.
No. Those estimates are 1 order of magnitude wrong. You wouldnt even pay that much contracting the highest tiers in AWS/Azure/GC , let alone owning the infrastructure.