> Will Google start deleting YouTube content that is super long tail and unviewed?

Well they added this to their ToS about a year ago:

> Terminations by YouTube for Service Changes

> YouTube may terminate your access, or your Google account’s access to all or part of the Service if YouTube believes, in its sole discretion, that provision of the Service to you is no longer commercially viable.

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21503851 for discussion)

Seems like hard drives aren't getting cheaper by that much of a margin nowadays [0]

Combine this with growing usage, this might make their projected costs much higher than expected

[0] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-cost-per-gigabyte/

"Will Google start deleting YouTube content that is super long tail and unviewed?"

That reminds me I should back up my youtube channel, I probably have videos on there that I don't have locally.

Now if only I can pay to not see ads in my personal GMail...

Possibly, but given its google I wouldn’t assume it’s more (or less) respecting of user privacy just because it costs something.

For the business products there may be strong business rationale behind it (it would categorically rule out too many applications), but for a consumer product I doubt that they don’t try making money both ways.