Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did some napkin math. If 1 billion people each backed up 10gb, we’d almost have enough to store a copy of YouTube with zero data redundancy. Google is massive.
It's unbelievable that YouTube was as free as it was for as long as it was. We got too great a deal for so long that we many people can't see things any other way.
Youtube sells ads and is subsidized by one of the biggest ad companies in the world that happens to have a lot of cheap cloud storage available.