YouTube - Why don't they delete irrelevant / useless content?

I must be missing something, most videos on YouTube no longer earn money.
so why do they remain there indefinitely, long after anyone cares?

Apparently it's quite costly for YouTube to host these videos indefinitely, on top of the 400 hours of new content uploaded a minute

Philip Defranco is a great example of a YouTuber who's content has a short lifespan.

however it's undeniable that after a few months, his videos become irrelevant. (That's the nature of news)
so couldn't YouTube remove content that people don't give a shit about anymore?

or why isn't there an app that hosts topical / news-based content for as long as they're relevant,
then removes them once the cost of storing them > revenue generated from them

...

This is bait

TL:DR

most yt vids only make money in the first few months
so why don't they delete that old shit to save money?

no? it's stupid that they have to host all those old videos indefinitely

Because those videos focus on news.

Why don't news sites delete old articles? Because they document history.

>implying this needs a TL;DR

Because breaking links is bad. Someone links to your content > the content vanishes or moves somewhere else > they're less likely to link to your content in the future.

And even without taking that into account, if you have a choice of uploading something to a site that'll keep it in perpetuity(or until I choose to delete it myself) vs. a site that'll take it down after an arbitrary amount of time, are you really going to say that you'll choose the latter? Revenue doesn't matter if no-one will use your site anymore.

when was the last time you watched a video about something that happened years ago?

>barrack obama being elected
>iphone 4s being released
>etc

yeah because news articles take up fuck-all storage
you're comparing a text file to a video being stored in
360, 480, 720, 1080, 1440, etc?

yet you still use Sup Forums?
the archives aren't permanent, and a lot of boards don't even have archives

people have been watching regular TV news for years,
where once aired, viewers have no access to it

plus. we're talking about topical content here
the sort of shit people stop caring about years down the track

AND, if a story is really so special, like on here
people can take it upon themselves to document it themselves

(eg: screenshotting a good thread / filming a funny tv story)

I'm sure people will really get pissed off if videos start being pruned for no reason other than "being too old".

If google actually cared about storage concerns, they would sift through the 40 years of video uploaded DAILY and delete the ones that are clearly popular videos being reuploaded by monetizer bots.

hey, some people have 3 second attention spans

I'm not saying ALL videos would be removed past a certain point
go to any old news story on youtube, look at 'statistics' and you'll see that people stop giving a shit in less than half a year
(or just look at pic related)

yeah, YT fucked itself by having the slogan "broadcast yourself"
they've branded the site as a place where any fuckwit can come and store a video forever

>google deleted a video that's embedded on my website
>changed the embedded link to a vimeo link
>it just works

plus, it would be the nature of the platform so it wouldn't be a surprised

if YouTube had started with this model, people would know that irrelevant videos eventually get pruned

so if there was a particularly good video, people can take it upon themselves to save it
hell, maybe there would be a free download link once it's nearing the end of its lifespan

A lot of the boards actually do have permanent archives at least for notable content. Not to mention that if you're actually making content as opposed to just shitposting, you're likely to host it somewhere else as well.

You're comparing two entirely different mediums, dude.

And that's exactly my point. Why would anyone do that if they can just link to vimeo in the first place.

why do you care though?
google isn't going away and neither is youtube
google would rather keep youtube running at a loss forever because they're on the forefront of the new media revolution killing TV and traditional media, and they're there to monetize the fuck out of it.
If they suddenly closed it down or started pruning videos and chasing people away, another site would quickly take it's place and google would lose their market dominance as an advertising and analytics company.

...

ok, well what about this then

there could be an alternate platform
YouTube would remain as the platform where videos stay indefinitely,
but a second platform could emerge

one that prunes content that has long since stopped being viewed / shared
and with the savings that brings, content creators could take a larger percentage of the ad revenue

i speculate hosting the ~400 hours of content uploaded every minute, is one of the reasons why YT isn't profitable

it just surprises me that they're forking over a shit ton of money to host videos nobody has watched in years
you people don't get it, the videos that would be deleted are ones that NOBODY HAS CARED ABOUT IN AGES

if the videos were still being viewed, then they wouldn't be deleted??

>Philip DeFranco
He's still around? I haven't seen or heard about that guy since like 2010. So, I guess Philip is running a news blog these days?

Because they would be deleting learning data for their super AI

maybe you don't realize this, but storage is incredibly cheap, especially when you play on the economies of scale that google does and have giant data centers on every continent and tons of redundancy

if nobody's watching the videos, they're not being sent over the wire, they're not wasting bandwidth serving them to you and they waste no money.

mpsyt

yeah he's had a huge amount of growth recently,
his content is actually top notch, check it out

no, they would already have collected the data they needed

the point is, the video is sitting there dead, not collecting any money or new data from users
because nobody is viewing or sharing it

yeah but we're still talking in the hundreds of millions here,

the amount of videos being uploaded is growing, so they have to exponentially upgrade their server capacity constantly
(not to mention that apparently only 10% of the videos on the site can have ads on them)

you seriously trying to tell me it wouldn't save them anything?

A quick google search shows that there are already websites that do something like that. Pretty much no-one just uses them.

Bigger share of the revenue isn't very appealing if the total revenue is smaller.

meant to reply to you

>40 years of video uploaded DAILY
65.75 years.

you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about
how would storage needs suddenly grow exponentially?
youtube usage isn't growing exponentially, there's only 2 billion people out of 7.5 who have computer access, only a tiny tiny fraction that actually upload videos.

all it would take is a few high profile content creators to migrate to start growing a userbase

they could be swayed by being given equity in the new platform
anyway, that's not the part i'm interested in discussing

storage needs are growing exponentially because more and more people are uploading...
it wasn't long ago that it was only 300 hours of video being uploaded a minute

therefore, they need to expand storage faster and faster to cope with the faster uploads

PLUS, more and more people using higher resolution devices = larger storage capacities demanded

also, YouTube is becoming increasingly popular in developing nations like India

add another billion easily

Do stupid kids really spend their time worrying about the business expenses of large faceless multinational corporations?

Not OP, but where did you hear storage was cheap?

16 exabytes were uploaded every year in 2012...
God knows how many are uploaded now

You can buy 8TB drives for only $150 now.
I'm sure you can get much cheaper deals in bulk.

not worried about YouTube,
in fact I'm considering making an app to compete with them

yeah yeah laugh all you want, I know it's implausible

Youtube was alwsys popular in india
>hello welcome to my guide to...
>let the bodies hit the floor in the background

yes but there are 1000000 terabytes in an exabyte...

I said increasingly popular, do you need reading glasses m8?

Ok so 1000000 TB in a EB

8 TB for $150
1000000 / 8 = 125000
125000 x 150 = $18750000 (For 1 EB)

They were getting 16 EB a year in 2012

16 x 18750000 = $300,000,000

do you disagree with this?

It would cost more money to build a system to delete useless videos. Storage space cost is negligible the real cost is running servers go process every video thats uploaded.

between trillions of *10 hours of spongebob meme* and garbage videos with less than 20 views I can't imagine how big the strain youtube is putting on google infrastructure

I didn't pay attention to those events when they were new. Not going to start caring now.

Go back, Shlomo.

Only fools pay retail.

>Storage space cost is negligible
This.

i for one think his tldr was exceptional

you forget youtube is not about the money

>when was the last time you watched a video about something that happened years ago?

Today, watched balloon boy and then video of father of his talking about how cops framed him.

>Youtube was alwsys popular in india
It's actually a black hole on my channel. Kazakhstan has more view time.

I'll be honest now that this idea has been presented to me I am royally annoyed as to why youtube doesn't do it.

>Youtube videos that don't receive 200 views/day one month after being uploaded will get deleted.
>Pay 5 dollars to keep your videos forever

That simple and youtube will stop bleeding money. Most people don't give enough of a shit to keep reuploading videos.
It also makes the youtube landscape dynamic because certain things like really old tutorials for random shit will have to get recreated which gives new creators a chance to improve on the old stuff.
Course this will never happen as it will fuck up too much shit.

>India
>developing

I fucking love Internet Historian.

If Google actually cared about the hosting cost, they'd just block all Asian countries but Japan to upload videos.
They make up like 70% of all the videos on YT yet barely any of them get any views.

It takes a while for a channel to get going, though. This was Kizuna Ai's first video. She's on track to break a million subs in the next three months.

>Most people don't give enough of a shit to keep reuploading videos.
Yup, they'll just use Vimeo or another service instead. Goodbye youtube.

Yeah kid, Vimeo and DailyMotion definitely don't know something you do.