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.
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.
Probably not—YouTube sells ads on fewer than 10 percent of its videos. Credit Suisse estimates that 375 million people around the world will play about 75 billion YouTube videos this year. To serve up all these streams, the company has to pay for a broadband connection capable of hurtling data at the equivalent of 30 million megabits-per-second—about 6 million times as fast as your home Internet connection.
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.
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.
YouTube's revenue share deals contribute an additional $49 million, according to Credit Suisse estimates, while general overhead -- sales and marketing, R&D, and G&A expenses -- are expected to set the company back about $24 million in 2009.
Finally, the cost of storage for Google's content library, estimated at about 150 million to 160 million videos for a total of 5 petabytes, is estimated at $12.7 million a year.
In addition to the default camera interface, in iPhone OS 3.1 and later you can manage the camera interactions yourself, if desired. You can provide a custom overlay view to display a custom picture-taking interface and you can initiate the taking of pictures from your code. Your custom overlay view can be displayed in addition to, or instead of, the default controls provided by the image picker interface.
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.
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world for you.
Services don't necessarily need to be as expensive as they might seem.
WebCams can be served from dedicated,
measured usage or the new Media Server
Bundles
A really nice touch
to any WebCam is multiple cameras! Ask the video equipment store for
a automatic switcher.
with at least 150k
reliable upstream bandwidth
available.
If your webcam has a steady
stream of visitors for more than 230 hours/month (~57 hours/week), you
will be better off on a dedicated plan.
Dedicated plans only pay for bandwidth capacity (max simultaneous
viewers), regardless of the amount of data actually transmitted.
You can
estimate costs of
measured plans
(including Media Server Bundles)
by total viewers/month and their
average viewing time. Measured plans also let your webcam burst
more bandwidth during peek usage periods then what a comparable dedicated
plan might allow for. For example, if your webcam receives 10,000 viewers/month
and they average about 5 minutes each, then you're only transmitting about 38.98GB/month. This
can only cost about $100/month for ~49 simultaneous viewers @109Kbps.
Maximum costs
can be controlled by specifying a maximum number of
simultaneous viewers when you subscribe to the publishing point service.
Please visit our
streaming media estimator to help determine
which service plan is best for you.
Nevertheless, partnerships, successfully implemented, do seem to be a solid monetization platform for social networks.
We've already seen micropayments implemented in Cyworld.
For example, when offering upgrades via micropayments, always offer a free upgrade as well as the paid upgrades. This gets the user in the mindset of purchasing - and once they see that everyone else has the free upgrade, they will want to express their individuality by purchasing upgrades.
"One of the interesting sessions I attended at BarCampNYC involved the monetization of social networks. The golden rule of sales is knowing your audience;"
You may have to resort to something like fmpeg, You could use uigetscreenimage which captures the video preview window, but I don't know what kind of framerate you would get.
