Youtube may be cheap for Google since they have their own data storage and server hosting, but to compete with it a company would have to buy/use cloud services like Azure. Those services (I think) would be prohibitively expensive for a site that lets anyone upload anything.
I've worked for companies that host regular websites that are relatively low impact (hugely low compared to something like Youtube) and the cloud service costs were really expensive still. I think to create a competitor to Youtube you'd need to set up your own server architecture which is no small feat. Consider that you'd need redundancies and probably want at least 2 locations with the space and ability to host a massive site having gigabytes (if not terabytes) of data uploaded every month.
It seems as though Google poured money into Youtube for about a decade and only turned it profitable recently; which is ridiculously unfair when it comes to competition. No one else (other than huge companies like Microsoft/Amazon/Apple) can afford to do that.
Basically I made this comment to say I disagree that Youtube doesn't cost much to run; even for Google I'm sure it is really expensive to host tons of data and constantly stream it everywhere for free.
Youtube may be cheap for Google since they have their own data storage and server hosting, but to compete with it a company would have to buy/use cloud services like Azure. Those services (I think) would be prohibitively expensive for a site that lets anyone upload anything.
I've worked for companies that host regular websites that are relatively low impact (hugely low compared to something like Youtube) and the cloud service costs were really expensive still. I think to create a competitor to Youtube you'd need to set up your own server architecture which is no small feat. Consider that you'd need redundancies and probably want at least 2 locations with the space and ability to host a massive site having gigabytes (if not terabytes) of data uploaded every month.
It seems as though Google poured money into Youtube for about a decade and only turned it profitable recently; which is ridiculously unfair when it comes to competition. No one else (other than huge companies like Microsoft/Amazon/Apple) can afford to do that.
Basically I made this comment to say I disagree that Youtube doesn't cost much to run; even for Google I'm sure it is really expensive to host tons of data and constantly stream it everywhere for free.
Rumble is currently working on its own cloud: https://www.rumble.cloud/