Very interesting article, it's good for entrepreneurs who are wondering what will happen when (of course ;-)) their websites start getting hammered with traffic.
Youtube probably uses more than all but the top 0.0001% of sites combined (or some very very small percentage).
"All by itself, YouTube comprises 20 percent of all HTTP traffic, or nearly 10 percent of all traffic on the Net. Let's repeat that: one site takes up 10 percent of the bandwidth on the entire Net."
It's a site that lets you upload a gif image, a sound, and some text. You pick a subdomain (for example, "something"). Then it puts all those on http://something.ytmnd.com. Each day, around 100,000 of these are viewed, so it chews up a huge amount of bandwidth.
Max is the owner of that site, and he's been living off of the advertising revenue at about the same living status as someone working full time at McDonald's. Last I heard, the advertising pulls in about $20k per month, and the bandwidth takes about $18k per month. He works all day and night on it.. it's amazing. I don't know why he hasn't sought investors or anything like that, but it's a huge community (even though it consists largely of teenagers).
Any investors who like investing in that sort of thing might want to contact him.
Mm.. There's some truly hilarious stuff on there. You just have to look for it, which takes some patience. For example, http://shockingcats.ytmnd.com/ ... C'mon, you'd have to be dead to not be slightly amused. :)
On a per-user basis it certainly could be. I don't think we have numbers on average stream duration for Justin or the number of videos the average YouTuber watches though.
Most of the YC companies don't do anything bandwidth-intensive so it's a pretty meaningless thing to compare.
