Scale Your Website Like YouTube - A Look at YouTube's Architecture
highscalability.com
highscalability.com
"All by itself, YouTube comprises 20 percent of all HTTP traffic, or nearly 10 percent of all traffic on the Net. Let's repeat that: one site takes up 10 percent of the bandwidth on the entire Net."
[http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2007/06/19/youtube-compris...]
It's a site that lets you upload a gif image, a sound, and some text. You pick a subdomain (for example, "something"). Then it puts all those on http://something.ytmnd.com. Each day, around 100,000 of these are viewed, so it chews up a huge amount of bandwidth.
Max is the owner of that site, and he's been living off of the advertising revenue at about the same living status as someone working full time at McDonald's. Last I heard, the advertising pulls in about $20k per month, and the bandwidth takes about $18k per month. He works all day and night on it.. it's amazing. I don't know why he hasn't sought investors or anything like that, but it's a huge community (even though it consists largely of teenagers).
Any investors who like investing in that sort of thing might want to contact him.
Some just make you think. http://atinyglimpse.ytmnd.com/ and http://thefutureofourworld.ytmnd.com/ are two examples. They may not be 100% accurate, but they do make you stop and think about things.
Others present issues in an unbiased way, letting you be the judge. http://timbalandtempest.ytmnd.com/ is one.
Like it or not, the guys composing YTMND's community are our youth. Their opinion matters, and they create things they care about.
Most of the YC companies don't do anything bandwidth-intensive so it's a pretty meaningless thing to compare.
That was my initial point. You don't really need to worry about scaling like YouTube. Scaling like Flickr and Facebook makes a bit more sense.
If you define user as someone that life-casts, then yes, it takes more.