What Happens to the Megabyte I Use on Websites and Apps?

People often ask, do websites make money from the data or mb I use to visit their sites?

What Happens to the Megabyte I Use on Websites and Apps?

Where does it go? Who makes a fortune out of it?

Many people often believe that website owners make money from the megabytes they use on their websites but that claim isn’t true.

My name is Olalekan and I own many websites I make money from. The Earnings, however, don’t come from your data (megabyte).

Now, you want to know the truth?

Follow me.

Let’s start with this:

Everything you upload or download online eats your megabyte, right?
What if I tell you it eats the megabytes of the owner of the website or app too?

Yes! It does.

Let’s use WhatsApp as an example:

When you send a 2MB Image to a friend, your network provider charges you 2MB for doing that.
When your friend downloads the same image (if WhatsApp hasn’t compressed it to be lesser than the 2MB), your friend will download the same with 2MB.

Gbam!

Their network provider charges them 2MB also for downloading the image.

So, you pay, your friend pays and… Whatsapp pays!

How does that affect WhatsApp?

The truth is, WhatsApp also pays for both uploading and downloading of images. Their own mb gets deducted when you upload and your friend downloads.

Funny?

Let’s go to the web!

The way you buy mb is the way most website owners buy mb on a monthly or yearly basis. And the mb can be exhausted too like your phone’s mb gets exhausted.

Yes.

Our own mb is called BANDWIDTH.

Surprised?

In fact, everything you post online goes to a physical hard disk somewhere in the world. Just like you save files on your phone or computer, whatever you post on Facebook (as an example) goes to a physical apartment somewhere in the world (The physical apartment is called Data Centre). The same is true for Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and many others.

WhatsApp does not have an apartment where they store your files but you still use their bandwidth to send or receive messages, that’s why you can lose your chats when you don’t backup.

How True?

Whether you believe it or not, that’s the truth!

Ideally, when you upload anything online, it goes to a hard disk somewhere. And when someone else downloads it, they download from the hard disk, like you send and receive things through Bluetooth.

A Proof?

The image attached to this post is my own online computer kind of. It’s 8 Gig RAM, has 4 CPUs and 101Gig disk space like your memory card or computer hard disk has. And this month so far, all my sites have used 225649.37 Bandwidth (that’s 225Gig out of the 5 Terabyte I get monthly.)

Interesting?

Remember how your memory card gets full?
The disk space online also gets full!
The image you saw is the new one I just upgraded to after the former one was full.
So the more files I put on it, the faster it gets full.

Now, About MB?

When I upload a 100 kilobytes image to my site, it eats 100 kilobytes out of my own data. Now, if 1000 people visit that page and the image is displayed to them, 100 x 1000 kilobytes is reduced from my own data online, as each of them also uses 100 kilobytes to download it.

More?

So, the owner of the site uses his own data whenever you use yours.

In fact, the way you get your data exhausted, we get ours exhausted too. The company we buy from automatically suspends our sites once we get it exhausted.

Gotten?

That tells you, we don’t make money from your Megabyte. It’s your network provider who makes the money. And they don’t give website owners any share. If they give, I’ll be a billionaire by now and your grandparents will even start blogging too.

So, How Do We Make Money?

The larger percentage of online money come from adverts. Advertisements drive the online world! (A talk for another day).

So, believe me when I tell you that WhatsApp isn’t making any money from you presently.

So?

WhatsApp is like a tree they’re watering for a future use. But Facebook makes a whole lot on a daily basis because they have adverts all over!

More so, there are many big websites that run on charity. People donate to keep them going!

Is that all?

No!

Apart from advertisements, people sell products and services online. For instance, when you visit https://GetMeri.com (one of my sites), I don’t make any money from your visit. I make money when you order one of my services.

So people build systems online to make money, some on autopilot.