How many videos on YouTube?

26 December 2023

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PInternet platforms such as Youtube are often difficult to measure the volume. However, the researchers were not afraid to face this challenge and answered the question of how many videos on YouTube. One of them, the MIT Public Policy Association Professor, Communication and Information, Founder of the Global Voices Blog Aggregator, as well as internet activist and blogger Ethan Zuckerman, along with his colleagues, estimated that more than 13.325 billion videos had been published on YouTube.

It is estimated that more than 13.325 billion videos have been published on YouTube.

statistical data in the online world

Several online platforms such as Reddit have long provided statistical data through special APIs. This allows researchers to understand user interest in memes, crypto, mental well-being, and board games. However, this year, Reddit stopped post processing capabilities on its site.

While Reddit and X are interesting, they are much less popular than YouTube, where almost everyone on the internet interacts. According to sources, 93% of teen internet users use Google Video Hosting. TikTok and Snapchat, which were ranked second and third in this age group, were only followed by 63% and 60% of teenagers on a regular basis.

Challenges in measuring how many videos on YouTube

Although YouTube has a well-documented API, there is no reliable way to get a representative random sample from YouTube. Most studies view YouTube as a collection of videos or through recommendations. This method allows good studies, but cannot calculate the extent to which YouTube is trying to count the number of videos published on the platform.

How To Measure How Many Videos On Youtube

Creative solution: “Drunk Dialing” and Jason Baumgartner

To overcome this challenge, the researcher turned to Jason Baumgartner, the creator of the Reddit data collection project called Pushshift, who has extensive knowledge about working with undocumented APIs. In the case of YouTube, Jason uses a tool called InnerTube to create a random YouTube URL and verify it.

Youtube URL looks like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXPJVwwEmiM,#atfp_close_translate_span# where the value changes after “watch?v=”. As a result, it is calculated that there are 264 possible YouTube URLs (about 18.4 trillion links).

“Drunk Dialing” method and important findings

Although there are many videos on YouTube, obviously not that much. Assuming there are 1 billion videos on YouTube, if we enter a URL randomly, we can only get the correct address in one trial of 18.4 billion. Researchers refer to this method as “Drunk Dialing.” After being optimized for several months, they managed to identify 10,000 completely randomized videos on the platform.

Back to “Drunk Dialing,” the researchers gave a comparison: if you call 413 numbers in the range 413-000-0000 to 413-999-9999, you should try 10 million possible numbers. In the case of YouTube, “Drunken Set” checks about 32,000 addresses simultaneously, and one “hit” is registered every 50,000 sets. As a result, researchers can calculate that the number of videos on YouTube is 13,235,821,970.

Statistik Berapa Banyak Video di Youtube

Additional stats and latest updates

After knowing the number of videos on the platform, the researchers were able to calculate the statistics further. For example, seeing the age of a video in a random sample can help see how fast YouTube is progressing. Researchers estimate more than 4 billion new videos were posted on the site only by 2023.

It is also estimated that only 4% of the total volume of content posted on YouTube has more than 10,000 impressions, but they account for the majority of the total view.

More reliable research methods

More importantly, the researchers finally managed to develop a more reliable method for studying YouTube than the previously mentioned “drunk set” method. This random video sample method is reliable because it sequentially traces the entire address space. The researchers plan to continue working with YouTube and updating various statistics on the platform. More detailed data from the 85-page research treatise has been recently published in the Journal for Quantitative Description.