How much does a web like Youtube cost?

[geni]

Software is free, man.

Flash however is protected by copyright patent and to an extent trademark. I don't think they have managed to get it personailty rights yet but I assume it isonly a matter of time.

 

[baron]

Development would be negligable compared to bandwidth costs.

 

[WildCat]

youtube? $1.65 billion is what Google paid for it.

 

[thomps1d]

Design+programming front-end webpages: $150,000.00 for a start.
Backend (server architecture, converting the videos etc.): at least the same as above.

In other words: Now, that you already know exactly what you want, you could set up a fake youtube for roughly a quarter of a million. Anything below might look like youtube or "simulate" youtube, but by no means be exactly like youtube.

A quarter of a million dollars? Man, I'd love to work for any company that overpays so enormously.

Heck, the company I work for just got a contract to build an eBay style web site for a client. Since I'm the only one on staff with programming experience, it fell to me to do the entire project...total cost so far (including my salary and a few minor 3rd party software packages) is under $15,000 USD. We've got maybe another week of development to finalize a few features, but we've already done testing of everything that's in place so far...even if the final cost ratched up to $20,000 USD, I'd be amazed. We've included all the features that eBay has, and have ended up with something almost identical to eBay itself (except, of course, for the fact that it's intranet only, and doesn't have a big shiny eBay logo on it).

Basically, if you have any programming experience (I'm an electronics engineer, but took several years of computer science courses at university, as well as programming in my off time for the last decade and a half), you can slap together a reasonably complex website in very little time, and for relatively low cost. Estimates of $150,000+ for design and programming only like the one above are what are normally called NPFSA (Numbers Pulled From Someone's Anus) estimates.

Of course, all this depends on the traffic you expect the site to be able to handle. The site I've built has been scaled for a corporation's internal traffic, with 65,000 total users, and an upper-end expectation of 1,000 users simultaneously. If you want something that complex that can scale to millions of users, then you'll need to spend a great deal more money on hardware and bandwidth.

And then there are advertising costs...ongoing maintenance and administration...accounting...

There are plenty of costs involved with a large-scale site that go way beyond just programming and hardware, and those usually far outweigh the actual cost of developing the site itself.

 

[thomps1d]

youtube? $1.65 billion is what Google paid for it.

That's what Google paid for it, but that isn't what it cost to develop. The final product that Google purchased included development, bandwidth, hardware, etc - all the aspects of a well-designed site that have been discussed ad nauseam above, but they could have done all of that by themselves with very little problem.

What Google really put that money for was something that can't be slapped together in a programmer's office: reputation.

When Google bought YouTube, it was already well established as the best site out there for community video hosting and sharing. It had a well established community, and name-brand recognition. This was what Google wanted, because it was precisely what Google Videos had failed to achieve - the fact that they also got the YouTube software and associated goodies would have been a secondary consideration.

 

[wahrheit]

There are plenty of costs involved with a large-scale site that go way beyond just programming and hardware, and those usually far outweigh the actual cost of developing the site itself.

Which is exactly why I didn't come up with an answer like "a smart programmer can do a site like this for $15,000". Because this is rarely what happens in real life.

I'm working on a famous brand site at the moment, a month has passed - and not one single line of code has been written, yet. The concept papers alone have 150+ pages. The first $15,000 are spent with reading that stuff.

 

[thomps1d]

Which is exactly why I didn't come up with an answer like "a smart programmer can do a site like this for $15,000". Because this is rarely what happens in real life.

I'm working on a famous brand site at the moment, a month has passed - and not one single line of code has been written, yet. The concept papers alone have 150+ pages. The first $15,000 are spent with reading that stuff.

I suppose part of the problem could be written thusly:

The cost of developing such a site is directly proportional to the amount of management interference.

In the case I cited, I was given a general design directive ("Make it look like eBay, but not so much like it that we'll get sued"), and given the freedom to develop based on that.

I assumed that the OP was referring to this style of development - having his objective, but the freedom to develop it.

The interference of Pointy Haired Bosses always increases time and budgets required. That's why massive corporate projects can blow through massive budgets - not because the budget is actually required to do the job, but because the leeches in management have to justify their salaries.

Given that, I'll say this:

If you're working for a major corporation, then the layers of management incompetence will cause your budget to be 10x the actual cost of creating this type of application. For small organizations or individuals, this type of project should not cost a great deal of money or take a great deal of time.

 

[Bodhi Dharma Zen]

Since most OS software is under GPL or LGPL there isn't really a legal way to do that (and before you think you can find way around that you might want to see what happened to Daniel Wallace and SCO).

Thanks for the advice. I believe that you refer to claim that the development is proprietary when it used a lot of GPL software? What I wanted to say is that the solution, and the way the tools are used, are proprietary, instead of relying on some pre defined PHP model, for example.

 

[Bodhi Dharma Zen]

The only thing i wouldn't be able to really do is make a nice design. but give me one and i can use that. But to just copy the design from youtube(illegal i know, but i'm just thinking in terms on how fast it can be done), no problem.

Thanks. But you still avoided to give me a hint on how much would it cost!

 

[Bodhi Dharma Zen]

... total cost so far (including my salary and a few minor 3rd party software packages) is under $15,000 USD. We've got maybe another week of development to finalize a few features, but we've already done testing of everything that's in place so far...even if the final cost ratched up to $20,000 USD, I'd be amazed.

Interesting. Total time was? And of course I understand what you say later about the other costs involved.

 

[thomps1d]

Interesting. Total time was? And of course I understand what you say later about the other costs involved.

It took about two and a half weeks for the actual development, plus another week and a half of testing so far. I'm still doing some revisions, but it's more polished than many other web applications out there.

That time figure, however, includes my other duties as well - I haven't been devoting 8 hrs/day to the project. If you are able to dedicate yourself full time, and work hard on it, you could shave off a considerable amount of that time - if not for browsing the JREF forum, I'm sure I would have shaved a good portion of that time off the estimate.

 

[kevin]

As others have mentioned scalability is the real issue. Slapping together something that looks like Youtube can be easy, running it like Youtube much more money.

BTW, software development on an open source OS such as Linux does not mean your code must also be open source. Those that claim so don't understand the GPL, it's only when you USE their code in your code that the license comes into effect. If you link to their library the issue is a bit more complex (it's allowed for proprietary software to link to LGPL libraries, but not for GPL libraries.)

Oracle and IBM both sell their proprietary databases to run on top of Linux without problems.

You can also write software that is compiled with an open source compiler (Apple's PPC builds use GNU's compiler, I believe their Intel builds use Intel's compiler).

And you can write proprietary software in a language that is Open Source. Again, if it's your code you can use whatever license you want. If you incorporate other's code into yours then the license may come into play.

 

[JAStewart]

Bandwidth costs would be where you'd be getting rogered for sure.

But then if you have enough ad's on your website...

 

[Daald]

I guess I'll throw my 2 cents in this topic as well.

Can you throw a site together that mimics the major behavior of some major site cheaply? Yes, but it will not be good but maybe good enough for you.

If you want to clone youtube in scalability and functionality, I would say it will cost in the millions easily simply because of the technologies that it will require.

For example. I am currently working on a website for a big healthcare provider. We did the site in half the time that other firms were requiring (1 year). Now we are on extended contract to improve the site. The two major things they want is Spanish language support and a complete UI redesign. Can these things be done in 2 weeks? Never.

The reason is that shortcuts were taken and the client has come up with enough requirements that it requires re-architecting certain elements of the application. Definitely not a big deal but it's really easy for the client to add "trivial" things that really over complicate the design. Those trivialities can't be accounted for ahead of time and any estimate you get you can safely double.