commit a3ca03b5f8f38e4c9f87503e52ccbeb2ec6a226a
Author: andrew.laack <andrew.laack@imbue.com>
Date: Sat, 13 Sep 2025 13:53:16 -0500
Started working on first article.
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+# The Sustainability of YouTube
+
+## Context
+
+I dislike using cloud services because they may discontinue my service [1]. This concern, along with concerns about privacy [2], has led me to keep information, and content, I care about away from cloud services. This does make me wonder, how many people would be distraught about the loss of their content if YouTube terminated their account? This is not the topic today, nor is it something I can easily answer, but it is important context for the way I think about these services.
+
+Similarly, I am skeptical of 'free' services. It's incorrect to say "if something is free you are the product" because charity does exist, but when it comes to Google, they aren't a charity. Their current model with YouTube is to have people upload videos to their site and show ads prior to some users watching said videos [4]. Notice though that they do not purge content on a regular basis except for the exception of ToS violations. As such, there is a (nearly) monotonically increasing function that describes the storage requirements of YouTube. Along with this, there are hard limits for the density of information storage [4] and limited growth potential for the company to sustain their data storage. This leads to my question posed below.
+
+## Question
+
+When will YouTube be forced to start purging content?
+
+## Hypothesis
+
+My inclination is the physical limits of the universe constraining information density are not the bottleneck for their data storage problems. I suspect the cost of maintaining (resilient) data centers for video storage will be the bottleneck. My unresearched guess is they have ~10PB of data uploaded and compressed onto their servers per day. I think I can buy 1TB of storage for ~$10 if I buy a larger HDD so it might cost me ~$100,000 to buy enough hardware the data uploaded to their servers in one day. I would also assume they get a substantial discount on their drives, but they also need redundancy and a location to keep them.
+
+This cost seems trivial compared to the compounding cost of maintaining large scale data storage so I don't think it should be taken into account for my hypothesis. If they need to replace drives on average every 6 years this amounts to ~$1,666,666/exabyte/year. I'd also think all supporting costs add up to approximately $2,000,000 per year. I suspect YouTube's max potential earnings are ~$300,000,000,000 per year, regardless of external factors. This leads me to believe YouTube may only be able to support ~81,818 exabytes of data. At my assumed current rate of 10PB saved to their servers per day we find they will be forced to start purging content from their service in 22,416 years. Man, I was not expecting such a high number... Let's start the research and see how far off my prediction is!
+
+## Findings
+
+## Conclusion
+
+## Citations
+
+[1] - Example of cloud service discontinuation
+[2] - Privacy concerns
+[3] - YouTube business model
+[4] - Limits of information storage
