Youtube is a behemoth of the internet. At present, there are over 5 billion videos on Youtube, almost as many as there are people in the world. As internet speeds continue to grow, video is quickly becoming the most important medium to most of the world and Youtube is the home of original video content. Find out more stats about Youtube by reading on.
In the last year, there were over 600 hours of content uploaded every minute or over 10 hours every second. This figure is staggering and shows how endless the internet has become. Considering the average person lives 700,000 hours it would take over 1400 people their whole life to watch the 1 billion hours of content that YouTube currently has starting from birth. Of course, if they were born today, by the time they were finished watching there would be over 25 billion more hours created (assuming a consistent rate of uploads).
Since Youtube lifted its restriction on video length the average video has grown to 15 minutes and continues to grow. The rate of user growth has slowed considerably due to saturation. The current online population is really using Youtube as much as it can. Numbers will grow as more developing countries harness faster internet that can handle more video.
In terms of categories, music is still incredibly important to Youtube. It accounts for 5% of all content on the platform and 20% of all views making it the number one format for the platform. Music videos tend to be shorter than other content too so the hosting cost for Youtube is lower. Gaming is the fastest-growing section but is rather long-format content at 24 minutes with a far lower rate of engagement.
The fact that music is so important to Youtube is surprising. Youtube is one of the lowest payers of royalties of any platform. If artists start to understand just how important music is, they may start to demand more.
