YouTube by the Numbers

Lee Gomes from the Wall Street Journal dives head-first into YouTube and dug up some fascinating data...

* In a single month the number of videos on the site grew 20% to 6.1 million

* YouTube has some 45 terabytes of videos

* Video views reached 1.73 billion

* 70% of YouTube's registered users are American, roughly 50% are under 20

* The total time people spent watching YouTube since it started last year is 9,305 years

Tags: youtube

Comments

A lot of naysayers seem highly interesting in downplaying the ultimate profitability of YouTube. In my senior year of college, my school became the tenth school added to facebook. Today, facebook is brokering major advertising deals and hosts thousands of institutions around the world. While the content is different, I believe YouTube will have equal rock star status soon. At 23 and probably in the direct marketing group for YouTube, my friends and I immediately recognized the significance of facebook, and we recognize how huge YouTube can be with a little imagination and business savy. YouTube is not only an it thing, it has major sustainability. I rarely turn on my t.v. but in the past couple of weeks on YouTube I have become a frequent visitor. I look forward to watching the site's growth.

[karl long]

Wow, those are some amazing stats, and in many ways this is just the begining. Just the fact that 70% of profiles are american means they have not scratched the surface of the global social video market. I imagine the blogosphere is a good leading indicator of social media (being the easiest to adopt), and right now only a third of all blogs are in english: http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000433.html

[Adam Isserlis]

YouTube is definitely not going away, yet barring the inevitable acquisition from Google or Apple, I still wonder if they can become profitable considering the ridiculous cash train they have due to all the bandwidth they need.

The partnerships and exclusive ad campaigns are a start, but are they enough?

[zakster]

Bandwidth costs will come down and advertising revenue will increase contributing to YouTube's eventual profitablity if (and it's a big if) someone doesn't begin to encroach on their quasi monopoly and offer more and better content while satifying the "look at me"/America's Funniest Home Video's niche.

[Kyle Cordes]

I content (at the URL below) that 45 TB is not such a big problem:

http://kylecordes.com/2006/08/30/youtube-tb/

[shedwa]

Here's a video that sums up YouTube visually:
http://shedwa.blogspot.com/2006/08/i-love-youtube.html

[Martin West]

Some very interesting blogging on this subject. I understand that 300GB harddrive vary in cost from $300 to $600. and that YouTube had ~ 250 servers at around $3000 each. 100KB/Sec is the bandwidth of a video, (~768k DSL), A single HD can stream 35MB/sec therefore at the current rate of 100M views per day... 300 clips each 30 sec - 300 users from each drives. I estimated that they need to support > 35,000, probably 100,000 concurrent users at peak times. this would be 300-400 drives...

What is the bandwidth requirement?

[timtheman's website]

That is pretty cool... 45 terabytes is quite a bit of data to store. It is about equal to 45,000 GB or 45,000,000 MB or 45,000,000,000 KB or 45,000,000,000,000 bytes.

[DEENO]

I am guessing it is more than 45 terabytes now. An average video on youtube is about 9 megabytes and there are around 7,850,000 videos. That equals out to 70.65 terabytes! Keep posting your videos LOL!

I searched for "com" in google video search. It shows up with 75,251,700 results (videos?) if that is so then youtube has about 550 Terabytes of video stored. Keep uploading your videos!

[paul sanchez]

it would be great if you could give us an update on youtube statistics. especially since you come up in first in the SERPS for "youtube statistics". I'm a big fan of your blog... keep up the great work.

Paul

[Yo YO YO]

The stats are very outdated. I would like to see some new stats.

Search for "youtube" in Google video and you get millions of results times that by 7.5 and you should get the amount of video in MBs

[bill]

bwsert 4
sd51g 6
se1s2d 0
asd5f4 3
asd5f4ie4b 0
aer68 44
aer68aw65rt 0
jio89 18
3s5df 5
s35d43 4
e6r4g 45
35sd4e 1
s6d55 4
6sa54f 0
s32e4e 1
s3eoljrd 0
2s1es3 0
6s8dr 6
5we4r7 0
2s47ew 0
e357w 2
sbe324 8
ear354w7 0
op6787 2
k6jioik 0
er654re 0
jkmli4 0
cg35ea 0
drz258 1
drz257 2
xdf358w 0
63sdfa 0
35ertdr5 0
iolj61 0
iolj61ui5ol 0
we6823 2
5set4w 0
5df6re 0
sd65f18 0
yuo6j 3

[leeann]

I can guarantee 2,000 views of your Youtube video in 2 days.

More importantly, I spread your video through myspace, which is how to get your video virally spread online, since youtube makes it so easy to embed in your profile.

I have over 100,000 friends on myspace.

If you are interested in getting your video promoted, please paypal $25.00 to jubudiwa@gmail.com and in your note to seller, please send the link to your Youtube video.

I will begin promoting it right away and you will feel the effects immediately.

If you want your video to be spread virally online, this is the way to do it. If your video is good, chances are, people will link to it, and you'll be famous, thanks to me.

This is the same technique that worked for Lonelygirl and Chocolate Rain.

Good luck!
LeeAnn