If you're an avid fan of the YouTube app, you're well aware of how transparent and very public-facing it's proven to be over the years. Users get the chance to see content galore and research anything and everything under the sun.
However, there are times when one wonders why the video-sharing app doesn't like to detail too many statistics about its success. For instance, why does the app go quiet when asking simple queries like how much content viewers see. Interestingly, other things are so public like effects on the algorithm and the economy of today. The platform is quite silent in that regard considering it’s got more than 2.5 Billion users every month. That’s one in every three people on earth using it. Did we mention how the average user watches up to 29 hours of content each month?
When you do the math, it’s about 8.3 Million years of content seen on YouTube each month. Over the past year, this is the equivalent of 100 Million years which is a hundred times greater than the total of human history.
But wait, the curiosity does not end there. We want to know how many videos are actually there and what are they all about. Which languages do most YouTubers speak and beyond? Sadly, the app isn’t going to be upfront on that at first.
This is where the issue lies. Many feel YouTube might be operating a lot of things in the dark which users should be aware of. That’s partly because there’s no simple way to attain random video samples. You can either pick what the algorithm recommends or use the manual approach. So that means unbiased options that are worth real-time and study are difficult to attain.
Several years back, we saw teams of research experts come up with the best possible solution. This is designed to give rise to a new computer program that pulls up content in a random fashion. It tries billions of URLs at a single time. Some might refer to it as a bot but that’s going into extreme. Zuckerman feels it’s more accurate to refer to it as a scraper.
Surveys display that in the two decades of operations, YouTube remains at the top of the list of the most popular apps in America. Up to 83% of all adults and 93% of all teens are part of its user base. It’s also the second most popular website on the planet by estimates. Only Google managed to top it.
Now the platform has entered the third decade but still, it’s such a secret for many. One spokesperson mentioned through a blog post about the recommendation algorithm. It refused to comment on the stats and other problems highlighted above so the mystery does continue.
It’s hard to get an idea of what’s happening inside apps because while organizations operate them to make public disclosures, these are fragmentary and misleading. Google does not wish to tell others about how large and brilliant the platform is. They don’t want others to know about the figures for users and how great the content is. To be honest, it’s almost as if Google doesn’t wish to share the major influential stance it holds in people’s lives.
However, Zuckerman and his team of research experts are hard to beat. They want a program that can roll out random characters and quick checks depending on the corresponding video. Whenever a scraper finds one, it installs it. It’s all thanks to the fact that URLs on the app use classic formats. They were able to get a huge data set and the scraper had to go through nearly 18T potential URLs. Despite the large figure of bad guesses for each video found, the findings were finally analyzed.
Secret stats including the figure of videos users uploaded on the app. Google used to share such findings but not anymore. By the middle of 2024, the figure stood at 14.8 Billion videos which was a 60% rise than those seen in previous years.
While YouTube was created at the start to serve regular people, the company is more keen on serving professional creators than anyone else. The recent scraping project by Zuckerman’s lab proves that it’s actually less like television and more in tune with being an infrastructure.
Take a look at the charts below for more insights:
Key takeaways from above charts:
The first chart illustrates the distribution of estimated views per YouTube video, showing that most videos receive relatively few views. The highest frequency occurs in the 17-32 views range, with a peak around 10-11%. The majority of videos fall below 2,048 views, while only a tiny fraction surpasses millions.
The second chart demonstrates YouTube's rapid expansion, growing from under a billion videos in 2010 to over 14 billion by 2024. The increase has been particularly sharp since 2018, reflecting YouTube’s accelerating content production.
The third graphic highlights language distribution, with English dominating at nearly 30%, followed by Hindi (around 10%), Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian, each contributing approximately 5-10%. Other languages like Arabic, Japanese, and Bengali hold smaller shares, with diverse representation across global languages.
H/T:
BBC
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by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World
