Nobody warns you that a tube is mostly a storage business wearing a video costume. My library keeps growing, the old stuff never earns, and i am scared to delete it, so the storage bill climbs every quarter whether traffic grows or not. How are people actually handling this. Cold storage for the long tail, aggressive pruning, re-encoding everything smaller. Curious what moved the needle for you in practice, not just in theory.
Re-encoding the back catalogue to a more modern codec bought me the most, the old stuff was sitting in formats twice the size it needed to be. After that, cold storage for anything not watched in a year. It is not that deleting is wrong, it is that you can almost never tell which old clip is quietly still pulling a trickle of search traffic, so moving it somewhere cheap beats guessing and regretting it.
The honest answer most people do not want to hear is that a chunk of your library should just be deleted. If a clip has had single digit views in a year and no organic landings, it is costing you money to store a file nobody asks for. Keep what earns or ranks and bin the rest. Hoarding every clip you ever made is sentiment, not strategy.