The company is likely spending well over a $1 million per month on electricity alone, say experts we’ve spoken with. Bandwidth is likely another $500,000 or more per month on top of that. The company has earmarked $100 million to buy 50,000 servers this year and next. And sources say they’ve been buying one NetApp 3070 storage system per week just to keep up with all this user generated content. At up to $2 million each, that adds up quickly – we’ve heard estimates that they may have spent as much as $30 million this year alone with the company. And the icing on the cake – earmark another $15 million per year in office and datacenter rent payments.

Last year, TechCrunch reported that Facebook spends $1 million a month on electricity, $500,000 a month on bandwidth, and up to $2 million per week on new servers to keep up with its users' insatiable photo-uploading needs.

But YouTube's problems point to a larger difficulty for many Web startups: "User-generated content" is proving to be a financial albatross.

There's a simple reason for this: Advertisers don't like paying very much to support homemade photos and videos

At YouTube, the relationship can be backward: The videos that get the most clicks—and are thus most expensive for YouTube to carry—trend toward the sort of lewd or random flavor that doesn't sit well with advertisers.

Despite having a library of approximately 150 million to 160 million videos, analysts estimate that YouTube is only able to monetize about 3 percent of its video inventory.

streaming 5 million videos a month

Analysts place bandwidth costs associated with YouTube at about $360 million a year, or $1 million a day.

Sponsored videos ($37.1 million) and sponsored links ($30.1 million) also contribute to YouTube's revenues.

On the cost side, Credit Suisse estimates that Google spends $711 million in operating expenses related to YouTube. Those costs include bandwidth, content acquisition, partner revenue shares, site overhead, and storage.

Storage costs $12.7 million a year.