If social media platforms pay exponential amount for hosting historical user data, how are they able to remain profitable?

Question

I was just thinking about YouTube’s business model because why not, and I saw a video from 2009 show up. They’ve been paying hosting fees on that one specifics video since, and doesn’t look like it’s generated much ad revenue for the past few years. But the hosting fees are a constant. With the amount of content YouTube has to host constantly growing, how are they able to stay financially afloat? What happens when they reach market cap and users are generating the maximum amount of ad revenue possible?

edit: typo in the title my bad

In: 2

Answer 1

Rotating disk storage (not SSD) is cheap, and getting exponentially cheaper. YT is owned by Google, so they do not pay any “hosting” fees, just storage costs. All YT videos are transcoded (compressed), so the storage is cheaper thanks to that as well.