No Stupid Questions

Storage is cheap, especially at the corporate scale.

Make two simplifying assumptions: pretend that Google is paying consumer prices for storage, and pretend that Google doesn't need to worry about data redundancy. In truth Google will pay a lot less than consumer prices, but they'll also need more than 1 byte of storage for each byte of data they have, so for the sake of envelope math we can just pretend they cancel out.

Western Digital sells a 22TB HDD for $400. Seagate has a 20TB HDD for $310. I don't like Seagate but I do like round numbers, so for simplicity we'll call it $300 for 20TB. This works out to $15/TB. According to wikipedia, Youtube had just under $29b of revenue in 2021. If youtube spend just $100m of that — 0.34% — they'd be able to buy 6,666,666 of those hard drives. In a single year. That's 6,666,666x20TB = 133,333,333 TB of storage, also known as 133^note^ ^1^ exabytes.

That's a lot of storage. A quick search tells me that youtube's compression for 4k/25fps is 45Mbps, which is about 5.5 megabytes/s. That's 768,722 years of 4k video content. All paid for with 0.34% of youtube's annual revenue.

Note 1: Note that I am using SI units here. If you want to use 1024^n^ for data names, then the SI prefixes aren't correct. It'd be 115 exbibytes instead.

EDIT: I initially did the price wrong, fixed now.

YouTube is known to reduce the quality of old videos. The resolution is often the same (e.g.1080p), but the image quality is way worse compared to when those videos were new. They're probably doing it to reduce their storage cost.

I mean, advertisements don't even make a lot of money

Advertising has made Alphabet one of the richest companies in the world. I assure you that it does make a lot of money.

Google datacenters are global. They store petabytes of data in each and are constantly evolving to Google Cloud customer needs and their own, meaning they are always expanding their storage network with new servers and drives.

In addition to the hardware expansion, YouTube engineers are experimenting with ways to encode videos in much more efficient formats, such as AV1. Basically, encoding is how a video is stored. The engineers are trying new standards to retain original video quality in much smaller file sizes, leading to more video storage capacity without the need to upgrade servers as quickly.

Storage for YT is not like storage for your computer. The question to ask is not if Google has enough hard drive space to keep old videos, but what it costs Google to keep all YT videos available enough to meet demand.

First keep in mind that there isn’t just one giant server at YouTube. Everything is replicated onto many parallel servers. And enormous datasets that are too large for any one server are “sharded” across many. Perhaps it takes 1000 server clusters to store one copy of everything.

Now you have to parallelize copies of those 1000 so there are redundant servers that can scale up to meet viewer capacity. This is a server “grid.”

But only some videos are being watched millions of times today. Only those server nodes need 100x redundancy for scale. The long tail of less watched videos might barely need a single node to be kept available.

So there is a massive “head” of videos that need tremendous server capacity to be available enough, and a very long and thin “tail” of videos that don’t require much resources at all.

The “head” grows as YT’s overall audience gets bigger. It’s very resource hungry and is probably their main challenge.

The “tail” gets longer as the total library of videos grows. But the tail is thin and making it longer isn’t that expensive.

I’m sure there is also a threshold below which they will drop videos. Made over 1 year ago. More than 30 seconds long. Has never been viewed once. Auhthor account hasn’t been visited in a year either. Drop it. No one will ever know.

No, they just add more servers.

Google is a trillion dollar company. TRILLION DOLLARS!

i imagine they will delete content. they have already started deleting google accounts with 2 years of inactivity.

If you're asking if YouTube has a finite amount of storage, the answer is yes. Assuming no safeguards were in place, you could theoretically fill up all their storage.

If you're asking whether they will run out of storage... probably not while it is considered important. YouTube can buy additional storage space (the good ending), or they can delete content they deem unimportant (the bad ending). Or, they could decide that YouTube is "finished" and elect not to increase its storage. It's their storage, so they call the shots.

Really, everything hosted "in the cloud" is hosted locally on someone else's storage. If that storage dies, the data dies, unless you or someone else has a backup.

Edit: fixed for clarity

There's a physical limit to everything (I'm talking more land space here, they can't just keep adding new drives for infinity), especially since a site like youtube will only get more expensive to run as time goes. I expect them to start deleting content that doesn't make them money like videos with under 5 views that are over a year old relatively soon especially with the current economy. This would make sense for them and would free up a lot of their storage. Google doesn't disclose the profit margins of youtube but I am pretty sure they are not very large especially now with 8K HDR videos being available

But first, will YouTube run out of video IDs? Tom Scott answers: https://youtube.com/watch?v=gocwRvLhDf8

Go back into an old email account and try old links. I did that and found links that work from the early 00’s but there are a lot removed.

My first reddit link was from 2007. Memories…

Google has said they'll start deleting long inactive accounts. I'm guessing they'll go for unlisted next. Eventually they'll try and prune their catalog to not have tons of unprofitable videos.

can't wait until Google has a planet dedicated as its server ☺️

I have wondered the same from time to time, but I really don't think so, every time tech becomes better and smaller (for the most part), it wouldn't be crazy to think we can double or triple the current amount of normal storage we have in a few years, without compromising size at all, and Google has the funds to adapt these new tendencies first than most folks.

more than 6x10^80 bits might be a bit to much