So I discovered today that many of my old posts had disappeared. Ok, so the posts didn't disappear, but the content has because it was hosted on DTube. If you go back 2-3 months you'll see a post with a picture, and when you click on it the circle goes round and round, but nothing plays.
I'm a little bit irritated by this. Yes, in the DTube discord #faq, as of 5/29/2018, it says that old videos will be deleted, but this is a little understated -- 13 words in tiny font. You'd think this would deserve large, bold-faced, all-caps WE WILL DELETE YOUR VIDEOS AFTER TWO MONTHS TO MAKE SPACE ON OUR SERVERS or maybe not.
I guess I went into this making many assumptions, several of which didn't hold. My mistake.
In all seriousness, I've made 23 DTube posts, earning an average of $6.951 per post. Then 25% is around $1.74 fee per post. Yes, some of my profit was from DTube rewards, so let's round this down generously to $1.00 in fees per post. Some of the posts were lengthy, but others were not. Again, if I round up in their favor, were looking at around 2GByte per post.
According to the BTCManager article:
https://btcmanager.com/tag/dtube/
DTube estimates $0.044 per GByte per month. Let's round that up to $0.05.
At this rate, my content should have been viable for 40 months before becoming a financial burden.
Maybe I've made a mistake with the math... let's say I'm wrong by 2x, then the magic number becomes 20 months. This is still one order of magnitude off.
There is something not right here. Am I missing something critical in this estimate?
Anyhow, I'm in the market for a video hosting site. I like the idea of distributed content, but perhaps I should simply pay for my own hosting? I can post and advertise on Steemit and host the data on my own server. Does that make any financial sense? Data storage is cheap if you're only hosting for one person.
Thanks for listening to my rant... I apologize if it sounded too harsh. I don't mean to be. I do think that Steemit (and others) should think about the definition of value and content. It is hard for me to say that persistent content should be given the same value as content that is deleted in 2 months. (My videos showing how to make Pastirma were valued at $68, but now they are worthless because nobody can view them.) But again, there very well might be something that I'm missing in my understanding.