What We Discovered on ‘Deep YouTube’
Until last month, nobody outside of YouTube had a solid estimate for just how many videos are currently on the site. Eight hundred million? One billion? It turns out that the figure is more like 14 billion—more than one and a half videos for every person on the planet—and that’s counting strictly those that are publicly visible.
I have that number not because YouTube maintains a public counter and not because the company issued a press release announcing it. I’m able to share it with you now only because I’m part of a small team of researchers at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst who spent a year figuring out how to calculate it. Our team’s paper, which was published last month, provides what we believe is the most comprehensive analysis of the world’s most important video-sharing platform to date. The viral videos and popular conspiracy theorists are, of course, important. But the reality is that the number and perhaps even importance of those videos are dwarfed by hours-long church services, condo-board meetings, and other miscellaneous clips that you’ll probably never see.
Unlike stereotypical YouTube videos—personality-driven and edited to engage the broadest possible audience—these videos aren’t uploaded with profit in mind. Instead, they illustrate some of the ways that people rely on YouTube for a much wider range of activities than you would find while casually scrolling through its algorithmically driven recommendations. YouTube may have started as a video platform, but it has since become the backbone of one of the 21st century’s core forms of communication.
