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Comment by movedx | Hacker News Reader

As a content creator with seven years experience, hundreds of videos and thousands of hours of content: just charge me a fee to host my videos. I'd pay $100/month, possibly more, to run a YouTube channel without.

Why is running ads the _only_ choice? Why can't a creator opt to pay to host videos on their channel with limitations? $10/month? That's 30 videos in HD max. $100? 300 videos in 4K... etc. ... or whatever.

As a content creator with seven years experience, hundreds of videos and thousands of hours of content: I use Freetube. Please use it until abusive adverts and practices aren't a thing anymore.

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In fairness to Google, costs to host video would scale with viewers. Unless creators are willing to pay increasingly excessive costs as their viewerbass grows (which I doubt) some kind of per-viewer cost (like ads) needs to be charged.

There's no guarantee creators can collect as much income without Google either. Google has proven they can get way more income from ads than pretty much everyone else, and even bug channels with sponsorships still derive a very large income portion from Google ads (based on what I've heard from LinusTechTips videos)

Then how are Vimeo doing it? They're fixed price.

The cost to serve the video file is much lower than what Google says it costs. Moving a terabyte of data is quite cheap to do, yet GCP, AWS and ilk continue to have eye-wateringly high data usage pricing.

> Then how are Vimeo doing it? They're fixed price.

They limit you to 2TB per month of bandwidth:

* https://vimeo.com/upgrade-plan

If a video goes viral and you shoot past that you'll probably get a call from them.

You also have a finite amount of storage space available with them, which depends on the account tier you're at: no infinite storage like with Youtube. (And with 4K video nowadays, that can be burned through quickly.)

In this scenario you’d also have to pay for bandwidth since that’s the variable cost here. The more views you get, the more you pay. And obviously you wouldn’t get any money from YouTube for views since they aren’t making money from your videos.

Genuinely curious, would you still go for it?

> In this scenario you’d also have to pay for bandwidth since that’s the variable cost here.

For Google? You think Google get a monthly bill for their bandwidth?

Most of Google, AWS and ilks traffic is moved over settlement free peering and fixed cost infrastructure: https://www.lightreading.com/cable-technology/level-3-seals-...

Whether 100TB or 1500TB of data are delivered to one ISP at one peering point in a given month has minimal effect, that 10Gbps, 100Gbps or larger port is a fixed cost that will exist regardless of traffic.

Precisely. I used to rent dedicated servers in the early 2000s that gave me such options.

You'd need to pay based on traffic too not just video total. And have a system in place to add payment if your videos became hits. Would really curtail amateur uploads.

Conceivably an option for professionals with business models but hard to see it being a default for a service that wants traction.

> hundreds of videos and thousands of hours of content: just charge me a fee to host my videos. I'd pay $100/month

$100 wouldn't even cover the storage mate. Let's say you've got 2 thousand hours of content (smallest amount that qualifies for "thousands")

At 2k resolution, that'd be around 30TB And you'll want to preprocess it to 1080p, 720p, 480p, so add another 15tb for the other resolutions.

And YouTube supports 4k, so if you're shooting at that resolution, you can add another 50tb on top.

Purely storage you're already looking at a ~$2500 monthly bill.

And then you're gonna have to host and serve it to hundreds of thousands of viewers, the bandwidth cost is gonna be astronomical. Every 100 hours of streamed content is gonna be another ~$100 on top. With a 15 minute video, that'd be 400 views.

And I significantly rounded down on every calculation as this is napkin math. If you'd use AWS S3 pricing for storage and egress you can safely double my dollar numbers.

I’m sure you’re right but how does Google afford to do it then? Do they have methods to drastically lower those costs? $2500 per month for each creator seems like it wouldn’t be a business worth running.

There are very, very few YouTube creators that actually have thousands of hours of video.

Even if it's a vtuber/live streamer they'd still have to publish ~6 hours every day for a full year to get to 2 thousand hours

It's pretty much the peak of the iceberg

I think your pricing is quite a little bloated. Having said that, nobody can even in a lifetime produce thousands of hours of valuable content. But the fact that it's free to do so has content creators dump all their crap on youtube instead of being forced to cut it down to actually valuable 1% of it.

That seems like someone has some extremely comfortable margins, $2,500/month could buy me ~50TB of hard disk space at consumer prices. I'm sure that sort of estimate is undercalling the complexity of a storage operation, but nonetheless - there'd have to be some discounts to be found. If nothing else, Backblaze claims to be able to store that much for $300/month.

$100/month for 50TB probably isn't feasible but start compromising on resolution and something could be made to work.

To get 50TB usable storage you're gonna need at least 100TB, otherwise everything will go down once a single disk fails until you've restored the raid.

Unless you want to be completely capped and unable to ever publish again you're gonna have to add at least a few TB (+10TB, 120TB total) and then you'll need a secondary storage for backup, so another 60 TB, 180TB total

At $320 per 16TB disk that can handle being active 24/7 (actually only ~14 TB usable, but let's ignore that) you're left with $3750 at the very least, ignoring that you'll have to continuously replace them, electricity is also pretty expensive with HDDs. House them in a server etc

You too are wildly off with your math, as I'm literally flooring every calculation. Realistic estimates by a professional are gonna be _way_ higher, especially because this kind of storage doesn't have the iops to serve video to multiple consumers. It'd be at best a NAS that can serve to maybe 2-4 ppl at a time

> ...as I'm literally flooring every calculation.

But your calculations are for a different problem. You're not solving for "what is the best I can do for $100". You're solving for "what do I need to clone Google's infrastructure for thousands of hours of video footage".

Eg, you doubled the amount of storage space to avoid rebuilding RAIDs when a disk goes down. There is an obvious alternative - don't do that, let the RAID go down and rebuild it while eating the downtime. That sort of thing isn't a big deal for discount video hosting. Maybe even force people to keep their own backups.

I'm adressing the original comment (by movedx) of giving channels on YouTube the ability to disable ads and let the channel provider/creator eat the cost instead.

So yes, I'm basing my calculations on YouTubes service. What you're imagining is obviously an option for individuals that only want to serve to few individuals at a time, but is entirely offtopic to what was proposed here

I think if you reread the comment you'll find that movedx didn't propose what you think he proposed. At no point did he suggest what you seem to be cost-estimating.

He suggested $100/month for 300 videos and noted that he was experienced in content creating.

> As a content creator with seven years experience, hundreds of videos and thousands of hours of content: just charge me a fee to host my videos. I'd pay $100/month, possibly more, to run a YouTube channel without.

Literally the the first paragraph

That is two sentences, but his post has a few more and those two don't say quite what you're interpreting them as. He didn't say that he expected YouTube to host all his content for $100/month. There are two separate ideas - one presenting credentials and the other was saying that he'd be happy to pay for hosting if he could avoid ads - but not that he'd expect to be hosting thousands of hours at YouTube quality for $100/month.

He didn't actually say or imply what you think he did. In fact a later part of the comment ("10/month? That's 30 videos in HD max. $100? 300 videos in 4K... etc. ... or whatever.") clarifies that he meant what he wrote and it is something quite different to what you're picking out.

Okay, let's go with that. It's still very few views just for egress, as mentioned: with a 15min video that's something like 400 views on one video.

My point from the beginning was that $100/month is not enough to host a successful channel on YouTube. You absolutely can do it on vimeo, self hosted jellyfin or similar. Plenty of options around. It just get extremely expensive if you're serving content to hundreds of thousands or even millions of viewers.

You can probably start at $10/month with a hetzner shared instance and 1tb storage and unmetered 1 Gigabit Ethernet. Gonna be fine for ~2 simultaneous viewers

I only addressed the storage first because his idea was so far outside of a realistic price. Storage cost is a rounding error on the invoice if you're serving videos to consumers with views as a semi successful YouTube channel gets

> You can probably start at $10/month with a hetzner shared instance and 1tb storage and unmetered 1 Gigabit Ethernet. Gonna be fine for ~2 simultaneous viewers

I think that is still overcooking it. Peertube has a FAQ on the subject [0], going off that it's probably achievable to have 1,000 concurrent users at ~$50/month+storage. Not commercially advisable, it is pretty obvious that everyone in the game ends up going ad-supported and that makes sense to me. But YouTube could in support something like that for small channels without too much trouble. The issue here for the median channel case doesn't look like costs in the >$1,000/month range as much as foregone revenue and operational complexity. The vast majority of content creators don't get hundreds of thousands of views.

[0] https://joinpeertube.org/faq#should-i-have-a-big-server-to-r...

Especially if you can just serve 720p instead of 1080p during the "downtime".

You can get 4x22TB (60TB with RAID5) for ~120$ so for less than 250$ you get the storage with geo redundancy.

https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/sx65/

You literally skipped the part where I said I'd be happy to be limited to a set number of videos per channel.

You also need to be happy with a limited amount of views with that scheme/ videos going private after that, because storage is literally the cheapest cost. I used that as an example how far removed you're from a realistic price estimate

If you're just using YouTube for hosting - there's other ways to pay for that, Vimeo comes to mind.

What about if you're using YouTube as a hosting platform and viewer acquisition channel, but not as a monetization channel?

Then you'd have to pay for viewer acquisition part and no way in hell you're getting that kind of a platform with creators paying for development/hosting without advertising.

There are plenty of third-party video hosts out there that let you do this. Wistia, Vimeo, etc.

I know, and neither of them are the second biggest search engine in the world and have _all_ the traffic and viewers.

As a youtube premium subscriber... since I'm already paying let me set my home screen only to my subscriptions.

Also let me opt-out of the algoritm.

You can opt out of the algorithm by choosing to pause and clear your watch history, you won't have a feed, can only view your subscriptions

+1. I have done this. It works well.

I watch videos from my subscriptions in reverse chronological order and that’s it.

I noticed my very old Youtube videos have degraded in quality. I'd rather pay monthly then be surprised to find out important videos I trusted to Google have been effectively destroyed.

Do you have any evidence for that claim? Do you have the original sources to compare to? Can you provide examples? Genuinely curious.

What do you think of something like nebula?

Yea, i also wonder how people feel about Nebula [1] as an alternative;

It seems the problem is, with YouTubes monopoly, other services have almost no chance to succeed because of the "Network Effect"...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebula_(streaming_service)

It's not the second biggest search engine in the world :(

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