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Comment by rgbrenner | Hacker News Reader

Netflix spends over 50% of it's revenue on content production and licensing ($17B out of $30B), and they made $6B net profit in the past year.

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Netflix needs less storage than YT, because not everyone can upload to Netflix. This also makes edge caching easier.

Netflix doesn't need to subsidize anything. YouTube subsidizes a lot of videos which don't have ads.

Netflix serves a slightly larger portion of internet traffic than YouTube on the same amount of revenue. So whatever subsidization youtube is providing for those videos, is clearly outweighed by the monetization of the remaining videos. YouTube has higher revenue per GB of bandwidth served than Netflix.

Do you have a source for that? I am surprised that Netflix would be bigger than YouTube.

> Do you have a source for that? I am surprised that Netflix would be bigger than YouTube.

Sandvine is the usual source in the industry and they say: "Sandvine's 2023 Global Internet Phenomena Report Shows 24% Jump in Video Traffic, with Netflix Volume Overtaking YouTube"

https://www.sandvine.com/press-releases/sandvines-2023-globa...

I wonder whether Netflix has a lot less content to cache, so they can push much more to edges.

Netflix technically doesn't serve anything that isn't monetized YouTube does, and to some degree non-monetizable content skews the numbers Also, due to the nature of YouTube a large amount of content is repeated but still taking storage

Netflix needs (1) a copy of say Top Gun Maverick (And maybe variations for different resolutions), YouTube needs a bazillion Copies of it with small variations, clips with different music, people "commenting" on it, people actually making commentary, Highlights, YTP's, etc all of it with a wider range of resolutions and also to way more people, plus the overhead of checking against their master copy of copyright infringement

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