It was recently reported that YouTube has hit 72 hours of video content uploaded per minute, in a steady ascent since its inception in 2005. By 2007, users were adding six hours of video per minute – by January of 2009, that number hit 15 hours, by March 2010, 24 hours, by November of that year, 35 hours, and so forth.
Engineer Craig Mansfield came up with a number on how much it would cost Google to pre-screen all of it’s content – a staggering $37 billion a year.
YouTube has been having some copyright infringement problems since its inception, with record labels and movie studios suing over the platform’s lack of better control over what its users upload. YouTube recently lost a court case in Germany over 12 unlicensed songs a user uploaded to its server. The plaintiff had urged YouTube to install better upload filters in an attempt to stop illegal content streaming. Though, now with the 72 hour per minute ratio, the logistics of this sort of thing just become more complicated.
Mansfield calculated that it would cost $36,829,468,840, to be more precise, to employ 199,584 moderators to govern the uploads, which is just shy of Google’s annual revenue.
Essentially, Mansfield’s equation points out that YouTube uploads are very likely never going to be screened, even if Google employed some of oDesk’s $1 per hour branches.