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Youtube hit 4 billion views per day (engadget.com)
47 points by Garbage on Jan 23, 2012 | hide | past | favorite | 18 comments


Does anyone know if YT is actually turning a profit for Google yet?


The thing I love about youtube is that there is never any problem loading the pre-video commercials for Cox internet or whatever. They always come through in HD and without any lag, ever. And then more often then not, I have to turn down the quality of the actual video because it can't stream at a high resolution. Suffice it to say, I don't really use youtube.


For the love of crap, THIS. I'm glad I'm not the only one who's somewhat miffed that the advertisements are getting preferential treatment to the actual content (the reason people actually GO to youtube).

If I wanted to watch advertisements at the expense of content, I'd subscribe to cable again.


While annoying, you have to put things into perspective. You don't have to pay for youtube, and you can watch 30+ minute videos with usually only one or two 15 second ads. Compare that to TV where you're stuck with 5+ minutes of ads for the same 30 minute content. Alternatively, watch Vimeo or something instead, which (correct me if I'm wrong) doesn't show video ads and focuses on higher quality artistic content anyway.


The preferential treatment is more likely that an advertisement used across many videos is much more likely to be cached at a location near you than a specific video. Still sucks, but it makes sense.


An implementation where the ad is shown only after buffering a certain amount of contents would have been interesting.

You'd wait longer before anything happens, there would be less ad impressions, every metrics I can imagine would be lower than the current behavior, but it sounds so much more sensible. I'd love a service doing that.


4 Billion videos a day, I'm always astounded by such numbers - who is watching that many Videos? A bit of common sense:

- World population: 7 Billion

- Estimated total Internet users (including those that can't use videos due to bandwidth/volume limits): 2 Billion

- estimated max. potential Internet users for YouTube: 1 Billion

- estimated max. daily active users for YouTube: 500-800 Million

so everybody on this planet that is continuously using the Internet has to watch at least 5-8 videos on YouTube everyday - 365 days a years. To me that looks like there is an army of bots out there creating loads of statistical noise & billions of page views.

Guess we'll never know for sure as billions of dollars are made every year with online marketing and advertising that is closely linked to such statistics.


I would love if they provided some daily, or even live statistics. How much space and bandwidth are these videos consuming? Seeing this printed on a graph for the last 24 hours, month and year would be interesting too.


I dont understand why youtube has no Sopa/Pippa issues? I searched but didn't find a good answer. Could somebody expain that please?


What do you mean? If SOPA or PIPA had passed, YouTube would certainly have issues. Did the article suggest otherwise to you? As it is, YouTube receives DMCA takedown requests probably every single second, and they comply with them. So they stay alive. It seems the situation was the same with Megaupload, except that they didn't exactly comply all the time.


I know about the DMCA takedown requests. But as I understand it YouTube has to do their own investigation with each upload. At the rate of 60 hours per minute. That seems a bit difficult if not impossible. In that respect YouTube should be taken offline like they did with mega upload and many other sites. So, why is YouTube not burned like many other websites. There are complete series seasons on YouTube. I guess i was just expecting more commotion around YouTube then there currently is. (For the record, I oppose to Sopa and Pipa)


I believe that most of the DMCA compliance can be done automatically through the use of Content ID.[1] Basically, for partners that they have a Content ID relationship with (e.g. the big entertainment companies), they can automatically determine infringement and whether they should take the content down, or if it's OK to leave it up.

Obviously there are plenty of people who aren't using the Content ID system and are sending in traditional DMCA requests, but I imagine that the automated system takes care of a big chunk of the work.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/t/contentid


AFAIK YouTube can't self-censor and remain in the DMCA safe harbor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_L...

This is why Justin.tv can go on when its top channels are obviously illegal. It has to receive notice as such instead of simply monitoring what's currently broadcast and killing things like football.


Thank you for the answers. The replies makes sense to me. I just read that if you upload a Michael Jackson song you can get 5 years in prison. That's one year longer then what the doctor who killed him got.


By my reading of SOPA (and I think PIPA is very similar), youtube could not be construed as a foreign site and therefore would not be (directly) affected by SOPA. Of course google, being a DNS service provider, a search engine, and an ad service, would definitely have been affected by SOPA.


SOPA did not limit it's self to international websites. 1/2 the bill focused on foreign sites the other half applied to US sites.


I'm almost sure you are incorrect (the entire purpose of SOPA was to provide the same copyright enforcement to "foreign sites" as already exist for domestic sites). Can you point me to the section/paragraph of SOPA that you are thinking of?


Read:

TITLE II--ADDITIONAL ENHANCEMENTS TO COMBAT INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY THEFT

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/F?c112:1:./temp/~c112Ggu...:

PS: You replied several days after that post, but on the off chance you see this, I figured why not respond.




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