Travis – this is why you host multimedia externally. For example there is a great service for video-bloggers called Revver. It is a bit like youtube, but from what I have seen their quality is actually much better (ie. they don’t compress shit out of your video). They support themselves by selling advertisements embedded at the end of each clip. You get paid per views, and per clicks in a similar way as you get paid for hosting adsense adds. So not only you host your media for free – you also get paid each time someone watches the vid. This is the host that Ze Frank uses – and he has a cult following. To bad his show is ending on the 17th.

As for images, it is a bit more problematic. I think Flickr is a very viable solution for some of the bigger stuff, as long as you follow their TOS. Jeff Artwood of Coding Horror fame actually blogged about this issue very recently. He recommends the Amazon S3 service for hosting images which costs you $0.15 per GB/Month.

Of course if you are running a CMS with user submitted content you can’t always offload your media to external sites. Of course this is where advertising comes in handy. The more frequent users you have, the more you earn. Sooner or later you break even.

Of course if your traffic is substantial, then you need to find an appropriate hosting solution. For example, if my site here would become super-popular overnight, the bandwidth overage charges would probably run me into the ground.

That’s where you buy a dedicated server, and put it on a nice rack in a data center which has high bandwidth tolerance, or you get a T1 line and take care of the hosting yourself.

for a better formatted version of that last story, with some modifications… go to my website luke.

Un4scene – Heh… At my work they insist on using email for everything.

My boss likes to take a document from a server share to which I have access, and email it to me for modifications. Let me break it down for you:

1. he downloads the file from the network share onto his computer
2. he attaches it to email and sends it to me
3. the file travels few feet to our local SMTP server
4. our SMTP server pushes it to the Comcast SMTP server
5. the comcast SMTP server resolves the email address and pushes it forward
6. the file travels through few network hoops and gets to our POP server
7. I download the file from our POP server and modify it
8. then I send it back (go back to step 3)

Instead he could just tell me to modify the file in the folder X\Y\Z on the server, but I guess that would actually make sense. :P

Ok so I was thinking to day about my websites bandwidths and started really thinking:
Most people breeze through the average website look at all the pictures and maby download a thing or 2. These figures are all my own observations or gatherd from other sources so there may be a little bit of discrepency here:
The Average user uses about 2MB of bandwidth an hour.
The average person spends about 2 Hours a day on the computer.
So to keep you up we are at 4MB per day
Now there are 7 days in a week so 4 X 7 = 28MB and then theres 52 weeks in a year so multiply 28 by 52 and you get 1456MBs a year. Now thats just standerd stuff you know what a single mom might do, surf the net a little, post a singles ad… check there mail, then leave.
[color=#FF0000]So we will call this figure (1456MB) the Elnea zone.[/color]

BUUT WAIT you say.. Elneas a media nut and posts all sorts of crap! Thats very true.
Lets just use two people on this site: Elnea and Jeskid

[b]Elnea: [/b]She posts a comic almost every few days or a couple of images that usally always equate out to about 330 -500KB, and lets say she posts once every 4-5 days. And a video or song every other month that is about 15Megs… Elneas on the most watched list… so lets say that everyone on her friends list is watching her. She has 600 friends that means that those 600 people are adding about (does the math 15/2 = answer/4*52) 105 megs a year.
[color=#FF0000]We shall call this zone the Frequent Reader zone (1561MB)[/color]

[b]Jeskid: [/b]He hasn’t posted alot of videos recently but lets go back to when he was… he has about 2785 friends now… lets say he only had 2600 when he was posting videos all the time. Lets say his average video is 30 megs big. Over a years time his friends list has been increasing and I know it was smaller in the beginning but I will give the new friends the benifet of the doubt that they went back and downloaded all of his videos and im sure there are a ton of people who have downloaded a few of them multipul times. Jeskid had posted 45 episodes on his own hosting (well some guys hosting).
45 X 30 is an additional 1350MB a year to there bandwidth number. But looking at these people Im sure that they do alot more media related activitys so I am going to give them an additonal 200Megs a year (its my journal i can do what I want)
[color=#FF0000]We will put these in the Media zone with 3006MB a year[/color]
[color=#FFFFFF]………………………[/color]+[b]An additional gig to anyone who downloaded shades[/b]
Now we have the users who watch all the popular people including Elnea and Jeskid, so we will add up there 2 sums and that should make up for the diffrence of all the figures I dont have.
[color=#FF0000]The Media Plus Zone people are at 3111MB per year[/color]

Also, I will just look at one more figure but I will not add it to my list.
On aveage every gamer downloads atleast 1 episode of RvB a year.
+35MB (or if your keeping along trying to add up your own add about 30 MB per episode you have downloaded)

Now lets just look at figures:
NearlyFreeSpeech.NET (a host that charges by Gig instead of a monthly flat rate) charges
$1.00 per gigabyte per month (9/100ths of a cent per meg)

So Elnea Zone People: per year you should devide up $1.50 between all the sites you go to.

Frequent Readers: You need to also give about $1.50 to all the sites you go to and a few extra cents for all the sites with pictures and video.

Media Buffs: Devide out 3 dollars between all the sits you go to and a dollar to jeskid.

Media Plus: Do about teh same as the media buffs, and rember your few cents to elnea.

Thats why RvB can make so much off only 10 dollars.

just rember everytime you watch a video.. you just cost someone 5 cents.

Then there is the converse absurdity of my boss who insists I put one 100kb powerpoint on a disc because she doesn’t trust ‘those keychain memory things.’ No wonder I go through discs like candy.

I’m not sure what you mean…

The internet access cost depends mostly on your ISP. Advertisements… It costs me nothing to host them, and if you are on an unlimited plan (ie. you don’t pay per byte) it costs you noting to ignore or block them. I have no clue how much it costs to buy an online advert, because I never did it but I bet it is much more affordable than a print ad in a magazine…

:|

I would love to show you my math on advertisements and how much the internet costs… no real correlation other then they both use math