More than 13bn videos posted on YouTube with only 4% viewed more than 10k times

A team of researchers set out to determine the number of videos on YouTube, a challenging feat due to the complexity of estimating the volume of an internet platform. Undeterred, a group including Ethan Zuckerman, an Associate Professor of Public Policy, Communication and Information, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, along with other enthusiasts, embarked on the task. Their findings revealed that there are over 13.325 billion videos on YouTube.

It was noted by Tech News Space that platforms like Reddit have allowed statistics to be collected using special APIs for years, but this ability has been recently closed off. Despite a well-documented API, there is no reliable way to obtain a random, representative sample of YouTube.

To address this challenge, Zuckerman and his team turned to Jason Baumgartner, the creator of a Reddit scraping project called PushShift, to help develop a tool called InnerTube. This tool could generate random YouTube URLs and verify their existence, ultimately leading to the determination of approximately 13,235,821,970 videos on the platform.

The researchers also discovered interesting statistics during their study, including the fact that videos with more than 10 thousand views make up only 4% of the total volume of content on YouTube, but account for the majority of views. The team's work is ongoing, with plans to continue their exploration of YouTube using a more reliable method for determining its size. Their findings are being regularly updated on tubestats.org.