To answer a video trying to calculate the profit made by Youtube I started to do some research and I found some interesting data that don't get a lot of attention. So I thought it would be nice to share them with you too ;)
Youtube's 2018 revenue is $14 billion (11% increase). Okay, but what's the profit?
The video mentions something like $1 billion but it's not as easy to calculate because some facts.
Alphabet (the parent company of Google and Youtube) has 35 data centers, including 19 in the US (2017) with a unit cost of $600 million (up to $2 billion for the one in Oklahoma) and a consumption of 5.7 Terawatt per hour (data of 2015). So electrical cost to be taken into account.
There are 2.5 million servers (Gartner 2016 estimate) where Google use modified power supplies for their servers to reduce the electric cost. It's very hard to know exactly how many servers are used by Youtube.
On the network side it's also very impressive, Google has 16,000 km of submarine cables worldwide, 102,000 km when you include the cables it owns in consortium with Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon (which represents 8.5% of the world's submarine cables). The Google Transatlantic Cable between Virginia and France transmits at a speed of 250TB/s. To this must be added the terrestrial cables. So a bandwidth cost depending from Google's policy towards Youtube.
Concerning the cost of the employees here too it's complicated to calculate, because to the 2000 employees approximately it's necessary to add all those which Google invoices in service (providing the infrastructure, it's sure that a part of the 100 000 employees of Google are charged as service provider to Youtube).
Conclusion, it's really hard to estimate the profit because Alphabet always refuses to communicate more than global data, but also because, being itself the provider of the infrastructure (hardware, bandwidth...) but also of a part of the employees (in service provision), it can adapt its invoicing according to the policy it wants to apply to Youtube.
Last little facts: 86% of the viewers are children, YouTube Premium is $1 billion revenue for 2019 and Youtube is estimated at $140 billion.
And for geeks like me, Youtube use MySQL for its database to which is added Vitess for horizontal scalability. A great success for an architecture where we would expect more a NoSQL solution.
To understand why horizontal scalability is important on big structures like Youtube or Steem I invite you to read my last article below.
What Steemit need to do next? SHARDING Solution for horizontal scalability of STEEM
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