How does YouTube, Google, etc. seem to have ‘unlimited’ storage for their users?
In: Technology
They definitely do not. The current status quo where users have come to expect that storage is free is inherited from an era when various growing companies – such as Google themselves, but also companies like Dropbox – were fighting to get users and were giving away storage for free. During the first years, GMail had a free quota that tended to double every few years – now it has stayed frozen for the last 10 years.
Now, it is a trend that many companies would like to see reversed – and they probably will – as it is becoming more and more of a problem. The price of storage was falling very fast during the early 2000s, but now has stabilized – and there were even a few bumps as storage transitioned from hard drives to solid state.
The era of free storage is coming to an end. YouTube still resists, but YouTube is probably the company that has the best monetization of the content they have to store for free.
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