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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.
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.
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.
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
I don't think that's what they meant. I'm pretty sure it was a reference to twitter limiting the number of posts a user can see.
Though it seems google is going to limit the number of videos someone can see if they have an adblocker installed.
Well of course, the algorithm does that so YouTube doesn't have to lol
They aren't profitable currently because of the race to the bottom are free sites funded by cheap venture capital are able to succeed drive out all the ones that actually have sustainable business models.
What's going to happen here in the very near future is the sites that charge you to upload, were you actually have to pay for your usage of the internet are going to pop up and then they will sustain themselves for longer periods of time.
Growth phase is over on the internet,
Wouldn't surprise me.
Why compete when it's cheaper to buy then shut down your competitors?