YouTube is twenty years old. It is twenty years since the YouTube domain name was registered on Valentine’s Day in 2005. It was originally conceived as a video dating site but the founders could not persuade women to upload videos. It has come a long way since the first video “Me at the Zoo” was posted by its co-founder in April of that year. Today, over a billion hours of YouTube is being watch on televisions every day. So, is it the new television?
The television screen is now the main way of watching YouTube in the United States and YouTube has had the biggest share of online viewing time for two years by Nielsen measurements.
YouTube Music & Premium has more than 100 million subscribers, including trials, globally.
YouTube is now also the most frequently used service for listening to podcasts in the United States.
YouTube TV, a full multichannel television service, has more than 8 million subscribers in the United States.
Studios are being built to create content for YouTube, even in Hollywood.
Neal Mohan, the chief executive of YouTube, describes YouTube as the new television. “But the ‘new’ television doesn’t look like the ‘old’ television,” he said. “It’s interactive and includes things like Shorts (yes, people watch them on TVs), podcasts, and live streams, right alongside the sports, sitcoms and talk shows people already love.”
YouTube is also embracing generative artificial intelligence to create still and moving backgrounds and instrumental soundtracks for shorts. Auto dubbing enables creators to translate videos into multiple languages.
No-one outside YouTube or its parent company Alphabet knows how many videos there are on the platform, but it is in the billions.
The dirty secret is that only a few of them are watched by many people. Researchers have estimated that the majority of YouTube videos get less than 500 views. It is estimated that 4% have never been seen at all. The median number of views for a video is estimated to be 41.
This estimate is based on research involving a random sampling of videos by a team at the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in the United States.
They developed a system that randomly selects YouTube Videos by generating random identifier strings and seeing if they match a video. That enables them to create a statistical model based on over 10,000 randomly selected videos.
As far as long-form video goes, the average YouTube video from a large sample is just over a minute long, with a median of 54 seconds, and more than a third of videos are less than 33 seconds long.
More than 40% of the same had just music, and no speech. Almost 16% of videos in the sample were primarily still images.
In terms of engagement, only a quarter of videos have any comments, and around 89% have no likes.
So, while some individuals may receive tens or even hundreds of millions of views, there is a very long tail of videos that are hardly watched at all.