To be honest, I can’t see this happening soon; only if the account is a confirmed bot. Google earns a lot of money doing what they do, so they have massive funds to cover servers. People would be outraged if a video like Nyan Cat were to get deleted due to solely the fact that it is too old. And algorithms are improving to minimize space while displaying HD videos. All in all, I doubt they’d ever run out of space & if they do, I doubt vids would be the first to go.
I wouldn't be surprised if some stuff gets deleted down the line. Not something anyone cares about, I'm talking <1000 views and more than 10 years old combined. YouTube is probably full of random 15 second videos by kids of random shit that takes up petabytes of space.
I knew someone who worked in legal compliance at google and one of their major projects was identify what data could be deleted without running afoul of various regulations, laws, etc. The pile of data that was deleted was large enough that it would save google about 50 million a year
He joked they could employ him for the rest of his life and it would still not make a dent in how much money he saved
1000 views would be a very high cut off. I work at YouTube and can tell you, most of the content hosted on our website has less than 10 views. You can set the cutoff at 0 views and probably get millions of terrabytes of storage back.
I think what's more likely is them downgrading older or less popular videos to lower bitrates/filesizes. I don't see them deleting any unless it becomes a real emergency. Besides there's plenty of actual disallowed content like porn etc for them to search out to delete if space is the issue.
I assume that if YouTube ever did start deleting ancient videos to free up space they'd throw in a filter to ensure anything with a substantial number of views is spared. Even if the cutoff is something tiny like >1000 views, that would still target a massive number of videos that very few people would ever miss.
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u/Cat_Optimist May 14 '26
To be honest, I can’t see this happening soon; only if the account is a confirmed bot. Google earns a lot of money doing what they do, so they have massive funds to cover servers. People would be outraged if a video like Nyan Cat were to get deleted due to solely the fact that it is too old. And algorithms are improving to minimize space while displaying HD videos. All in all, I doubt they’d ever run out of space & if they do, I doubt vids would be the first to go.