How BIG is YouTube?

YouTube is the second most visited website in the world but nobody knows how big YouTube really is. The number of total videos uploaded that can be found on the internet is wildly inaccurate, and only recently researched figured out a reasonable way to count the real size of YouTube. The platform is far more than just a few popular creators like Mr. Beast, MKBHD and PewDiePie who understand the algorithm and have their videos go viral. Many small channels and videos get little or no views at all, while representing the majority of videos actually uploaded to YouTube.

Blogpost "How big is youtube": https://ethanzuckerman.com/2023/12/22/how-big-is-youtube/

Research Paper "Dialing for Videos: A Random Sample of YouTube" (2023): https://journalqd.org/article/view/4066

Research Paper about Drunk Dialing (2011): https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2068816.2068851

Sources: https://www.similarweb.com/top-websites/ https://github.com/tombulled/innertube

The total count of YouTube videos uploaded is a well hidden secret and there are no official numbers indicating the real size, but by optioning a random sample of YouTube videos we can project not only the real size of YouTube but also what content is actually uploaded to YouTube, which one performs well in the algorithm and which one does not perform at all. ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B76FJnodYP0