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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..

By mikew at 20/07/2006 - 18:41 | english | media | tv | Web2.0 | webhosting | mikew's blog | 9038 reads

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once again

thanks for quality posting (hey, someone has to publish the good stuff).

as per IM, this is excluding host hardware, software and maintenance.

i read somewhere that the posting:lurker ratio is 1:200 meaning that there should be lots and lots of PB on disk. Cheap disk space with "some" disaster recovery or a higher raid, will be around 2 cents per GB per month.

On the plus site, the 5 usd per Mbps is for transit traffic. Limewire has a rather good peering policy and lots of partners so that should downsize the amount spend a bit... just a bit..

--
groets, bert boerland

By bertboerland at Thu, 20/07/2006 - 9:14pm | login or register to post comments

more numbers

here you can find a simular article with more and other data... http://blog.forret.com/2006/05/youtube-bandwidth-terabytes-per-day/

--
groets, bert boerland

By bertboerland at Fri, 21/07/2006 - 8:00am | login or register to post comments

Limewire has an excellent peering policy :-)

You made the same mistake as I always do. It is limelight not limewire. Limewire is the P2P file sharing network. Their peering policy (share and enjoy) is not very popular with the music and movie industry :-).

It would be interesting to estimate their storage requirements. We know something about their growth. They have 70000 uploads per day, which means an additional 580GB each day or 17TB each month. But that is assuming that a single copy of the content is stored. For limewire to reduce their transit bandwidth requirements they will need to store enough content across their nodes to maintain a high hit rate. It depends on what the curve is and how much activity there is in the long tail *slap* which determines how much storage they need in the nodes. But that information is probably not public because it is secret sauce of limelight (and most likely the difference between profit and loss)

By mikew at Fri, 21/07/2006 - 8:27am | login or register to post comments

bu they do have a good policy

<route-server>sh ip bgp 87.248.197.12
BGP routing table entry for 87.248.192.0/19, version 1124876
Paths: (19 available, best #19, table Default-IP-Routing-Table)
  Not advertised to any peer
  7018 3320 22822, (received-only)
    12.0.1.1 from 12.0.1.63 (12.0.1.63)
      Origin IGP, localpref 100, valid, external
      Community: 7018:5000
  7018 1299 22822, (received & used)
    12.123.21.243 from 12.123.21.243 (12.123.21.243)
      Origin IGP, localpref 100, valid, external
      Community: 7018:5000
  7018 1299 22822, (received & used)
    12.123.33.249 from 12.123.33.249 (12.123.33.249)
      Origin IGP, localpref 100, valid, external
      Community: 7018:5000
  7018 5511 22822, (received & used)
    12.123.137.124 from 12.123.137.124 (12.123.137.124)
      Origin IGP, localpref 100, valid, external
      Community: 7018:5000
  7018 5511 22822, (received & used)
    12.123.9.241 from 12.123.9.241 (12.123.9.241)
      Origin IGP, localpref 100, valid, external
      Community: 7018:5000
  7018 3549 22822, (received & used)
    12.123.17.244 from 12.123.17.244 (12.123.17.244)
      Origin IGP, localpref 100, valid, external
      Community: 7018:5000
  7018 3549 22822, (received & used)
    12.123.13.241 from 12.123.13.241 (12.123.13.241)
      Origin IGP, localpref 100, valid, external
      Community: 7018:5000
  7018 3549 22822, (received & used)
    12.123.5.240 from 12.123.5.240 (12.123.5.240)
      Origin IGP, localpref 100, valid, external
      Community: 7018:5000
  7018 3549 22822, (received & used)
    12.123.45.252 from 12.123.45.252 (12.123.45.252)
      Origin IGP, localpref 100, valid, external
      Community: 7018:5000
  7018 3549 22822, (received & used)
    12.123.37.250 from 12.123.37.250 (12.123.37.250)
      Origin IGP, localpref 100, valid, external
      Community: 7018:5000
  7018 3549 22822, (received & used)
    12.123.25.245 from 12.123.25.245 (12.123.25.245)
      Origin IGP, localpref 100, valid, external
      Community: 7018:5000
  7018 3549 22822, (received & used)
    12.123.145.124 from 12.123.145.124 (12.123.145.124)
      Origin IGP, localpref 100, valid, external
      Community: 7018:5000
  7018 3320 22822, (received & used)
    12.123.41.250 from 12.123.41.250 (12.123.41.250)
      Origin IGP, localpref 100, valid, external
      Community: 7018:5000
  7018 3549 22822, (received & used)
    12.123.142.124 from 12.123.142.124 (12.123.142.124)
      Origin IGP, localpref 100, valid, external
      Community: 7018:5000
  7018 3549 22822, (received & used)
    12.123.133.124 from 12.123.133.124 (12.123.133.124)
      Origin IGP, localpref 100, valid, external
      Community: 7018:5000
  7018 3549 22822, (received & used)
    12.123.134.124 from 12.123.134.124 (12.123.134.124)
      Origin IGP, localpref 100, valid, external
      Community: 7018:5000
  7018 3549 22822, (received & used)
    12.123.139.124 from 12.123.139.124 (12.123.139.124)
      Origin IGP, localpref 100, valid, external
      Community: 7018:5000
  7018 3549 22822, (received & used)
    12.123.29.249 from 12.123.29.249 (12.123.29.249)
      Origin IGP, localpref 100, valid, external
      Community: 7018:5000
  7018 3320 22822, (received & used)
    12.123.1.236 from 12.123.1.236 (12.123.1.236)
      Origin IGP, localpref 100, valid, external, best

--
groets, bert boerland

By bertboerland at Fri, 21/07/2006 - 10:51am | login or register to post comments

more on youtube

more on youtube

--
groets, bert boerland

By bertboerland at Sat, 22/07/2006 - 9:12am | login or register to post comments

profit!

``So, not profitable?'' needled moderator Kara Swisher, a Wall Street Journal reporter.

``Not right now,'' Hurley finally said.

source

--
groets, bert boerland

By bertboerland at Fri, 28/07/2006 - 2:13pm | login or register to post comments

youtube clone custom software development

These guys have an innovative approach to video streaming, youtube clones, myspace clones, and social networking:

youtube clone

By youtube clone custom development (not verified) at Sun, 05/11/2006 - 4:09am | login or register to post comments

haha

boy were you wrong

By devknob (not verified) at Sun, 24/06/2007 - 8:19pm | login or register to post comments

word of advice, I have

word of advice, I have mentioned in another post.
If you make something that is already exist -- Youtube...then you need to build something better than them, it is no point of providing a service that someone already had.

Example:
Friendster - been popular once because it links up with friends and friends. Blog system in which other friends will get updated.
Facebook - API, allow 3rd party to develop application onto them and linking across Facebook and Myspace. A hell out of a lot of features upcoming which beat Friendster in just one night.

By kritsch-AVRO-lid (not verified) at Sun, 13/01/2008 - 12:34pm | login or register to post comments

YouTubeRobot

YouTubeRobot.com today announces YouTube Robot 2.0, a tool that enables you to download video from YouTube.com onto your PC, convert it to various formats to watch it when you are on the road on mobile devices like mobile phone, iPod, iPhone, Pocket PC, PSP, or Zune.

YouTube Robot allows you to search for videos using keywords or browse video by category, author, channel, language, tags, etc. When you find something noteworthy, you can preview the video right in YouTube Robot and then download it onto the hard disk drive. The speed, at which you will be downloading, is very high: up to 5 times faster than other software when you download a single file and up to 4 times faster when you download multiple files at a time.

Manual download is not the only option with YouTube Robot. You may as well schedule the download and conversion tasks to be executed automatically, even when you are not around. Downloading is followed by conversion to the format of your choice and uploading videos to a mobile device (if needed). For example, you can plug in iPod, select the video, go to bed, and when you wake up next morning, your iPod will be ready to play new YouTube videos.

Product page: 3w.youtuberobot.com
Direct download link: 3w.youtuberobot.com/download/utuberobot.exe
Company web-site: 3w.youtuberobot.com

By kritsch-AVRO-lid (not verified) at Mon, 05/05/2008 - 9:22am | login or register to post comments

LoL yea it will stay that

LoL

yea it will stay that popular, and will continue to grow you incompetent swine. The majority of youtube are retards with little idea of the world , and i bet u that not even o.oo1% of the users on the site will EVER read that user policy, who the hell does? and seriously, who cares if they use your videos, its up their to be SHARED, and if u don't want it to, along with everything else, you may as well hide in an air tight safe.

By Hypock1 (not verified) at Wed, 26/11/2008 - 1:42pm | login or register to post comments

how can you pick out the best video converter

You are so great to tell us it. You are so cool to tell us it.

By kritsch-AVRO-lid (not verified) at Tue, 02/03/2010 - 5:41am | login or register to post comments

how can you pick out the best video converter

You are so great to tell us it. You are so cool to tell us it.

By kritsch-AVRO-lid (not verified) at Tue, 02/03/2010 - 5:42am | login or register to post comments