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youtube bandwidth usage: 25 Petabytes per month

When I read today that youtube hit the 100 million downloads per day and I had heard that they pay $1 million USD per month for bandwidth alone without a clear business model behind it, I decided to do the math myself to see if it made any sense.

100 Million/day	Downloads	BBC- youtube mentions 70M/dl/day on their fact sheet but youtube also claims it growths exponentially so 100 M/dl/day is reasonable.
3.35 min/movie	Average Movie Size	Based on the average length of the top 100 downloads of all time.
2.5 MB/min	Average datarate per movie/download	Based on 5 samples of the most popular downloads. There was almost no variation in the datarates between the movies.
8.3MB	Per download
24980858378.92 MB	Per month	= 8.3 times 100Mdl/day times 30 days/month
24980858.38 GB	Per month	Using decimal aka harddisk standard
24980.86 TB	Per month
25 PB	Per month	or 1250 "Library of congres" collections per month; an increasingly meaningless unit of size
or 77 Gbps	sustained datarate over one month

That is a fair amount of bandwidth they burn each month so what would it cost?

If they would pay $0.05 per GB/month(that is 50% of the lowest GB/mon prices I could find) the bandwidth cost would be $1.2M USD/month.

Bert figures they would be able to get a $5 Mbps/month price with their volumes and in that case the cost would be around $385k USD/month, expensive but their $11.5M USD funding should last them a little while (30months).

Of course this is only their bandwidth cost without hosting, storage, infrastructure and management. For comparion a Streamload managed service would around $7.3M USD/month but they probably could get a volume discount.

Youtube uses the Limelight CDN to deliver their content. Limelight's monthly revenue is about $4.7M USD/month. I guess youtube is a major portion of that revenue. I would assume that limewire provides the storage, hosting and bandwidth for youtube content.

And how are they going to make money? They carry very little advertising, only some google ads, but those don't play a role for video's embedded in blogs etc. Perhaps it is more sneaky and evil and they 0wn the distribution rights of all content published via youtube and are going to exploit it against the will of the contributors:

…by submitting the User Submissions to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the User Submissions in connection with the YouTube Website and YouTube's (and its successor's) business… in any media formats and through any media channels.

(via boing boing).

But with that business model you are not going to stay populair for very long..