I wonder if that still holds true? The volume of videos increases exponentially especially with AI slop, I wonder if at some point they will have to limit the storage per user, with a paid model if you surpass that limit. Many people who upload many videos I guess some form of income off YouTube so it wouldn’t that be that big of a deal.
What they said only holds true because the growth continues so that the old volume of videos doesn't matter as much since there's so many more new ones each year compared to the previous year. So the question is more about whether or not it will hold true in the long term, not today
The framing here is really weird. The volume of videos increasing isn't 'growth.' Videos are inventory for Youtube. They're only good when people (without adblocks!) actually watch them.
Growth in this context is that there are a larger volume of videos each year. So each year a single video is exponentially a smaller and smaller percentage of the total.
For example, if in year N youtube has f(N) new video. Let assume f(N) = cN^2. It's a crazy rate of growth. It's far better than the real world Youtube, which grew rather linearly.
But the rate of "videos that are older than 5 years" is still faster than that, because it would be cubic instead of quadratic. Unless the it's really exponential (it isn't), "videos that are older than 5 years" will always surpass "new videos this year" eventually.
Video sensors are continuously getting cheaper, better and more more prevalent over time. The trend is towards capturing all angles of everything, everywhere, at increasingly higher resolutions.
Maybe it could be used to train a neutral network. Maybe it contains dirt on a teenager, who might become a politician two decades from now. Maybe it contains an otherwise lost historical event.
Or it just helps to cement YouTube as the go-to place for uploading and sharing videos for almost any purpose which has a long-term positive effect for user engagement and retention
I assume it's an economics issue. As long as they continue making money off the uploads to a higher extent than it costs for storage, it works out for them.
