Quote Originally Posted by _ap_
Another way to think of it is in terms of time spent on a site. To keep a user entertained for a full month, thats roughly 10 visits X 20 minutes per visit = 200 minutes. On a broadband connection, assuming the user doesn't look at the entire set, they can blast through about 1-2MB of on disk content per minute. A photoset is about 2-8MB, so thats ~1 photoset every couple minutes, times 200 minutes per month = content burn rate of 200 photosets / month. Bigger files slows them down. Fresh stuff that nobody else has makes a difference because they jizz faster Video clips are even cooler because they take up more time and burn out slower so you need less.

You can run a hobby paysite on less, but if you want to make some real cash when you look at the size of your members section, it needs to say gigabytes. lots of gigabytes.

Hope that helps :teach:

ap.
Some very good insightful info! Thanks for putting that out there - it does help in figuring out just what it really does take volume wise to retain!