YouTube: What Lies Beneath the Surface

With YouTube celebrating 20 years this week, the fine folks at Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst asked some interesting questions about the near ubiquitous platform and found some interesting answers.?

• Yes, we know that YT accounts for 10.5% of all viewership by people 2+ years old in the US in January, ranking number one for like 137th month in a row.?

• Yes, we know that 83% of US adults and 93% of teens are on YT.?

• And yes, we know that people watch a billion hours of YouTube videos a day on the platform, primarily via their TV screens rather than their phones. (Moreover, 73% of the content folks watch is longer than 30-minutes, up from 65% YoY, per Digital I, but more on that later).?

But the folks at UMass Amherst got curious about, well, some pretty basic stuff. Case in point, how many videos are there on YouTube? Its an interesting question not just because YouTube is 20 years old but because its a platform that doesn’t sunset anything anyone uploads unless it’s for copyright infringement or taken down by the original poster (and likely a main reason why it’s the second most popular search engine cause how else is anyone going to find anything)??

So they scraped the entire platform. Looking at YT’s 11-character url configuration, they generated 18 trillion different urls combinations to identify a randomized sample set of just over 10,000 YouTube videos and found the traditional 80/20 rule in full effect and on steroids. Consider:?

• By mid 2024, there were 14.8 Billion videos, up 65% from 2022’s 9 billion videos.?
• The overwhelming majority of videos still generate less than 500 views with the median number of views for a YouTube videos is just 41?
• .21% of videos are monetized
• Only 38% are edited in some way
• Only 14% have some sort of set or background
• More than 40% had just music, and no speech.?
• 16% of videos in the sample were primarily still images.
• Around 18% of videos we're judged to have high quality sound
• 89% have no likes
• the median YouTube video is only 64 seconds long, and more than a third of videos are less than 33 seconds long

While these data points are a little stark and moderately interesting (if you’re into data), they aren’t surprising contrary to the predominant “YouTube is the new TV” wisdom. I imagine the aggregate data on Spotify looks a lot like this - billions of song uploads and trillions of song-plays but only by a fraction of a percentage of artists see the majority of those plays.

More importantly, the aggregate data puts into contrast (and reinforces) what we know about YT's success - the importance of creators (who we’ve read countless researchers on) that pop on the platform, their impact on the global viewership, and how difficult it is to permeate not just the algorithm but contemporary culture at large.???

As always, stay tuned.

Links

BBC: “How a computer that 'drunk dials' videos is exposing YouTube's secrets”

THR: “YouTube Surprise: CEO Says TV Overtakes Mobile as “Primary Device” for Viewing”

Pew Research: “Americans’ Social Media Use”