[ad_1]
“Suppose YouTube were a newspaper,” Alito asked NetChoice’s lawyers. “How much does it weigh?”
Those with old, and well-advised, internet-poisoned memories believe this is part of the country’s long history of people in positions of power not understanding the basic mechanics of how things work. may be embedded. In 2006, then-Sen. Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) likened the Internet to “a series of tubes,” which, while not entirely inappropriate, certainly misses the scale of what’s happening in real life. Alito’s comments seem to fall into the same category. Yes, YouTube publishes content, but not really in a way that rivals something like the Washington Post.
To be fair, he wasn’t actually trying to suggest that the two were equivalent. Instead, he was trying to assess whether his YouTube and similar platforms could be similar to newspapers in how they curate and present content. NetChoice’s lawyers objected to the restrictions imposed on social media companies by laws passed in Florida and Texas, arguing that the Supreme Court’s decision: Miami Herald Publishing Company vs. Tornillo It may set a useful precedent for the courts. (The Wall Street Journal editorial board agrees.) Alito mused about the different scale of what the Herald can offer its viewers compared to YouTube.
But this is the internet, and the reason discussions about the internet collapse into surrealism is because surrealism is the coin of the online realm. So it seemed appropriate to try and answer Alito’s question. “If YouTube were published as a newspaper, how much would it weigh?” How many trucks would it take to transport these documents to subscribers?
You need to start by considering How big is YouTube?.
As it turns out, recent research has been done on this obscure figure. A team of researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has created a methodology that allows them to compile numbers that estimate the size and nature of YouTube on an updated basis. YouTube’s real-time data website, tubestats.org, reveals that he has more than 14.4 billion videos on YouTube, with more than 412 million videos uploaded this year already.
But you don’t just need to know how many YouTube videos there are, just as you need to know how much storage space they take up. You need to know what that content looks like when displayed in newspaper format.
So you need to know at least two other things. How many of those videos have audio content and how long are those videos? (We’ll talk about videos without audio content later.)
Fortunately, researchers have estimates for both. According to their estimates, the average length of a YouTube video is about 615 seconds. This is an average, skewed upwards by very long videos (a 2006 study found that the majority were “full-length copyrighted videos of television shows and movies”). Median video length is 61 seconds. However, since we are trying to calculate the newspaper total, we will use the average. If you multiply the average watch time by the number of videos, the total watch time for each video on YouTube is approximately 281,000 years.
Researchers estimate that about 54% of the videos they evaluated contained spoken language in the first minute. You can see how difficult this is. The movie WALL-E doesn’t have any spoken words in the first minute, but it certainly has a lot of dialogue. But we work with what we have, and the Post isn’t going to pay me to watch YouTube for 281,000 years, so about 54 of the videos. Percentage includes spoken language, which may not be very defensible, but let’s assume that speech is included. It continues consistently throughout the video.
Why do you need that? Because if you’re going to put this on newsprint, you need to know how many words are being spoken.
People tend to speak about 150 words per minute. In English anyway. This presents a completely different set of problems that we plan to ignore. It’s about how to handle non-English videos. When the research team evaluated the videos they studied, they found that the most commonly used language was English, which appeared in 20 percent of his sample videos. This was followed by Hindi, Spanish and Welsh. (“Welsh is unlikely to be his fourth most common language on YouTube,” their report notes.)
For our purposes, the language used refers to the variation in content that appears in print. Chinese and Welsh use different amounts of space in printed materials. So assume all content is translated into spoken English at her rate per minute above.
Ultimately, we found that YouTube has about 7.8 billion videos with audio, and about 4.8 trillion seconds of play time. This gives us an estimate of just under 10 trillion words.
But we’re talking about newspapers here. Newspapers do not publish all news every day, only new news. (Hence “news.”) So, all you really have to look into is that of his 7.2 million videos published every day this year, 3.9 million of them are audio-verbal. This equates to approximately 2.4 billion seconds of audio, or approximately 5 billion words.
wonderful. Now, moving on to the next question. How much do those newspapers weigh?.
A review of Tuesday’s Washington Post (obviously a prime example of a newspaper) shows that the front page has about 1,700 words, and a page with just one or two photos has about 3,100 words. You can see that there are. This is our complication when dealing with videos that don’t have audio content. Instead of estimating the number of words needed to create a descriptor for these videos, just assume that you can summarize them visually. Considering that almost half of the videos are images only, we use word count estimates for image-heavy front pages.
So, how much does newspaper weigh? Well, you could just look at the cost of the paper itself, but the cost of the ink would be overlooked. It depends on the content. As the number of photos increases, the amount of ink and weight increases, albeit slightly. However, even small measures add up when multiplied by billions.
This is all just theory, so let’s use a back-of-the-envelope estimate of newspaper weight created by Reddit user “Mantra” in 2012. He gave an estimate of 18.4 grams (0.04 pounds). For a lightweight sheet of newspaper and an additional 12.5 grams (0.028 lb). That’s less than 31 grams or 0.068 pounds per piece.
If you pull apart the newspaper, you’ll see that there are four newspaper pages. Now you can do calculations.
When you match YouTube’s 5 billion words of daily output with a bunch of photos, it generates about 2.9 million pages of front page-style content. This equates to just north of 50,000 pounds of newspaper.
Or, to put it another way, to deliver the newspaper home each day, two semis pull up, one dumping all its contents and the other a tenth of what was in its cargo space. It means that it has fallen. . If you wanted to stream all of YouTube to your home, it would weigh about 100 million pounds, or about 85 percent of the weight of the Titanic. More than 2,200 trucks will line up to unload, and the line of trucks will stretch more than 30 miles bumper-to-bumper.
Of course, this all depends on our enforcement of largely ignoring videos without audio. This makes some sense, given Alito’s focus on newspaper editorial content. However, you can also do some simple calculations around non-audio video.
Let’s assume you want to include small still images in your paper to convey the content of each video. It is estimated that there are approximately 3.3 million videos, or approximately 34.2 million minutes, of non-speech content each day. The typical frame rate for video is about 30 frames per second, but for economy, choose a frame rate that’s half that. This still equates to 30.8 billion frames that would need to be displayed in a newspaper.
Printing at a 4:3 aspect ratio (the ratio used on television) and a width of 0.5 inches, you can fit approximately 4,300 still images on a page (accounting for extra space at the edges of the sheet). This equates to 7.2 million pages, or 1.8 million four-page sheets. Since it’s all ink, it’s even heavier, totaling about 321,500 pounds. Add to this £27,500 for an audio-video page with no images, and the total is around £350,000 per day for his newspaper. Eight trucks come to your house and dump tons of newspapers in your driveway.
The irony to all of this, of course, is that most people receive the Washington Post (or the Miami Herald, for that matter) online rather than in print, and the weight of YouTube videos isn’t real. about it. meaning. Alito pointed out that newspapers remain limited in what they can deliver to people’s homes. However, there are no functional restrictions on what you can offer your readers online.
In other words, the weight of this article is the weight of the phone you’re holding in your hand right now (assuming you’re reading that). If you read another article, the cost you incur is not the weight of your phone, but the cost of hosting and retrieving your content for The Post.
[ad_2]
Source link
