YouTube uses as much bandwidth as all other sites combined

[snopes]

Comment: I heard on the radio today that the increase in video download is
causing major problems with ISPs. According to the story, the bandwidth
from YouTube last year was the same as the bandwidth for the rest of the
internet combined. :P That seems insane to me. It is killing the
internet??

[zephyra]

Wouldn't that be impossible? I mean, surely there are more videos on the rest of the ever-expanding Internet than on YouTube. And that's nothing compared to the other crap that takes up bandwidth online.

[MidgardDragon]

I just don't see how that's physically possible. There's a LOT more internet than there is YouTube. And plenty of other video sites that use up plenty of bandwidth as well.

ETA: Thoroughly spanked. Thank you ma'am, may I have another?

[zephyra]

Originally Posted by MidgardDragon

ETA: Thoroughly spanked. Thank you ma'am, may I have another?

Woohoo! My first spanking!

[snopes]

Originally Posted by zephyra

Wouldn't that be impossible? I mean, surely there are more videos on the rest of the ever-expanding Internet than on YouTube.

By that reasoning, whatever site has the most pages takes up the most bandwidth, regardless of how much traffic it gets.

- snopes

[zephyra]

Originally Posted by snopes

By that reasoning, whatever site has the most pages takes up the most bandwidth, regardless of how much traffic it gets.

- snopes

Maybe I don't have a good understanding of "bandwidth".

[htonl]

This is very FOAF and I can't provided cites for any of this, but: I have seen graphs - from people who should know - that claim that YouTube, Facebook and MySpace together make up more than 50% of all web traffic at my university. (That is of HTTP traffic, not all Internet traffic.) I presume that is because videos, photos and audio (which are more prevalent on those sites than the web in general) are much larger than ordinary HTML pages.

I have also heard (from less reliable sources) that about US$ 5 million is spent per year by the university - which, for context, has 20 000 students and 2 500 academic staff - to provide the amount of bandwidth used by traffic to those three sites. I have difficulty believing that could be true, though.

[zephyra]

Our university actually blocked traffic to MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube from campus because it was clogging up the works and students couldn't get their assignments submitted.

[Troberg]

I doubt it could even beat The Pirate Bay when it comes to causing raw traffic. I use the word causing, as The Pirate Bay itself, while certainly drawing lots of traffic, is nothing compared to the traffic that goes directly between peers. With over 10 million simultaneous users, that's hard even for big hitters like YouTube and FaceBook to match. I wouldn't be surprised if only Google can match that number of users.

Google is probably also a big culprit if you only count HTTP traffic. Even though each request response is tiny, there's a lot of them and a lot of people use google often, to the point of it being almost ubiquitous in the global user base. YouTube, while being traffic heavy, is not used by such a large percentageof the users.

I've also heard that DNS lookups account for almost 20% of the traffic (this was before P2P and video sites), which was an argument used for not using DNS and instead use IP adresses.

According to my firewall, badly configured UPnP devices also provide an insane amount of traffic. It's constantly pocked by traffic from them. The wierd thing is that almost no one actually use UPnP, it's just a service that exists in Windows and is turned on by default.

Then, of course, we have porn. That's probably a large chunk of the traffic...

[Errata]

Originally Posted by htonl

I have also heard (from less reliable sources) that about US$ 5 million is spent per year by the university - which, for context, has 20 000 students and 2 500 academic staff - to provide the amount of bandwidth used by traffic to those three sites. I have difficulty believing that could be true, though.

If those sites takes up half the bandwidth, then that means $10 million total network costs. For 20k people thats about $500 a year, or about $22 a month. That doesn't seem completely out of the ballpark for broadband internet. As an end user I pay more than that, although presumably the university could work out a better deal than an individual consumer.

[jimmy101_again]

Originally Posted by Troberg

Google is probably also a big culprit if you only count HTTP traffic. Even though each request response is tiny, there's a lot of them and a lot of people use google often, to the point of it being almost ubiquitous in the global user base. YouTube, while being traffic heavy, is not used by such a large percentageof the users.

I wonder how Google's incoming requests compare to the number of outgoing requests Google sends in its web crawlers?

Back to the OP, I suspect that porn uses a heck of a lot more bandwidth than does youtube.

[snopes]

I suspect this article was the origin of the (slightly garbled) claim:

Video Road Hogs Stir Fear of Internet Traffic Jam

For months there has been a rising chorus of alarm about the surging growth in the amount of data flying across the Internet. The threat, according to some industry groups, analysts and researchers, stems mainly from the increasing visual richness of online communications and entertainment — video clips and movies, social networks and multiplayer games.

Moving images, far more than words or sounds, are hefty rivers of digital bits as they traverse the Internet’s pipes and gateways, requiring, in industry parlance, more bandwidth. Last year, by one estimate, the video site YouTube, owned by Google, consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet did in 2000.