Youtube Statistics: A Speculation Calculation.
Do we ever wonder how many videos Youtube has or how much memory (Hard Drive space) it takes to hold all those videos? I will attempt to calculate a rough estimate to how much data in bytes Youtube may be holding.
Considering the average video is about 7.5 Megabytes, which isn't very much so far. And finding out how many videos there are on Youtube... This is the tricky part. Or is it? I will do a video search on Youtube using the symbol “*” which basically means search anything and everything.
At www.Youtube.com I search “*” and get 70,700,000 results which is obviously an estimate because the results are rounded to the nearest 100 thousand. Also the results are known to fluctuate up and down. But this is speculation. Now, times that big number by 7.5 and you will get the videos in megabytes.
This should total 530,250,000 megabytes, which translates to about 530,250 gigabytes, which translates to 530 terabytes, which translates to about a half a petabyte! Is their any other variable we are not considering. Yes. If you were Youtube and had videos hosted on servers you would definitely back them up on at least two places. This means there are a total of one petabyte's worth of videos.
Personally I think there are a lot more videos than that because 70,700,000 results should just be the amount of videos Youtube is indexing. I have tried other searches such as com and got 74,900,000! That means there are obviously more videos that youtube fails to show as results.
Now lets calculate or “speculate” how many bytes are being uploaded a second. If the statistic that I read somewhere is true that states that ten hours of video are being uploaded a second we can easily figure this out knowing the ratio of bytes to time. Particularly megabytes to minutes. There are about 21 megabytes for every 10 minutes of video. I think we can use some cross multiplication for this.
First convert 10 hours into minutes and you should get 600 minutes. Then do some cross multiplication where you times 600min by 21mb and divide by 10min resulting in 1260mb. Do you know what this means? This means that every second at Youtube.com there is about one gigabyte of videos being uploaded a second. Could you afford to keep up with that cost to host that? Well, lets just say it would cost you about $2 a second, $120 a minute, $7,200 an hour, $172,800 a day, and $ $63,072,000 a year. Which I believe would cost more than that because of other variables.
