this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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I guess it's just impossible to make these types of large media storage sites profitable. The business model itself is inherently unprofitable despite there being a need for these sites. Like youtube will never bring a cent back to google, but they keep running it because it locks people into their ecosystem for data harvesting.
Could also be that snap bought gfycat just to kill it.
Storage is just the loss leader of the internet, really. Companies will take the loss for access to the data.
And hosting
Eh, your average bear isn’t doing a bunch of hosting. Sure there are folks who do, but the vast majority of the population does not give a shit about hosting. They do care when you interrupt their photo/video storage, though.
Free storage. Backblaze is doing just fine.
That is why I called it a loss leader. It is meant to attract people to the ecosystem (hence free), not be the product itself. Of course if you are appropriately creating, pricing, and selling low cost storage as a business model, you will nail it.
Youtube is definitely bringing back a profit to Google. Probably not huge, but definitely far from 0% return.
Now they did have to shove way more ads in there to make it happen.
Having an acceptable ratio between ads and a big media storage seems pretty much impossible, unless subscription based which most people can't really afford.
At least Google is smart enough to not put limit caps on video views or posts.
Youtube literally tried to limit 4k videos to paying subscribers but abandoned it(for now)
https://www.gsmarena.com/youtube_turns_off_experiment_that_allowed_4k_playback_only_to_premium_users-news-56193.php
Well a lot of people expect everything to be free too.
But while I can afford to pay for my email provider and a few services, there is a large population that is struggling to even pay their rent.
This is it, really. When people are living paycheck to paycheck which most people are there really just isn't money to go around to be paying for all these services. The money that could've gone to subscription has been taken by increasing costs of groceries