Back in 2019: 500 Hours of Video Uploaded to YouTube Every Minute
There's no way to manually (using people) to moderate this.... but it should be easier to report bad videos and have people just look at those for moderation, and not just auto-ban videos when enough people click on it.
Quick computation: 500hrs/minute => 262Mhrs/yr, US minimum wage 7.25$/hr, assuming no tool (but no verification), 1x playback rate, 2B$/yr, youtube revenue was reported at 15B$/yr in 2019.
> More nebulous is YouTube profit, which might be as low as zero (I can't find a source).
Ah right sorry, I googled youtube profit, and it returned youtube revenue. I would guess Google doesn't want to even know the profit of youtube, because that would be another anti-trust nail.
> That said, would human content moderation be particularly better? Lots of stuff falls in the gray.
Yeah I agree, that's just back of the napkin computation and it's missing a lot of nuances. Like how can you fact check a video by just looking at it? You can't. This requires more work. But then, you can probably look at videos at x1.5 speed, many videos are probably similar so with proper tooling you can find similarities and at least route it to the same person so they'll have less research to do to validate.
But overall I believe that there are both issues that make it cost more than just that, but also easy optimization wins that make it cost less than that. Either way, I believe that if youtube comes forward saying they spend 2B$/yr human salaries (spending 2B$/yr in training GPT-42 doesn't count) they'll get more respect from their users, even if it's not enough to be prefect.
There's no way to manually (using people) to moderate this.... but it should be easier to report bad videos and have people just look at those for moderation, and not just auto-ban videos when enough people click on it.