Half Of YouTube Has 35 Views

Half of every video on YouTube has fewer than 35 views, and roughly one in twenty has never been watched by anyone at all. Those figures come from the first genuinely random sample of the platform, published in 2023. This file opens the case of the long tail: why the average video and the typical video are two completely different objects, why the quietest videos get quieter as they age, and why the people who measured all this decided not to go looking for the person behind any one of them. I'm the RiddleWanderer. Archivist of mysteries. My consultant is a rubber duck named Archimede. He has never once been helpful. Subscribe, and we'll open the next file together. Chapters 0:00 One video in twenty 1:09 Consulting the expert 1:21 Nobody knows how big it is 2:38 Eighteen trillion guesses 3:56 The average is a lie 5:08 Ten thousand squares 5:54 Where the views actually went 6:38 What it actually looks like 7:30 Nobody said anything 8:24 The year in the title 9:08 It was never built for her 10:05 It gets worse with age 10:49 The links that stopped working 11:54 Why I like this one 12:47 Close #riddlewanderer #internet #youtube Sources McGrady, R., Zheng, K., Curran, R., Baumgartner, J. and Zuckerman, E. (2023), "Dialing for Videos: A Random Sample of YouTube," Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media, 3. DOI 10.51685/jqd.2023.022. The random sample of 10,016 videos, collected 5 October to 13 December 2022. Cha, M., Kwak, H., Rodriguez, P., Ahn, Y.-Y. and Moon, S. (2007), "I Tube, You Tube, Everybody Tubes: Analyzing the World's Largest User Generated Content Video System," Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC '07), pp. 1–14. DOI 10.1145/1298306.1298309. The Zipf distribution, the truncated tail, information filtering as the preferred explanation, and the age cohorts in Figure 5(b): one day, three days, one week, three months. YouTube Official Blog (23 June 2021), "Update to YouTube Unlisted Links," blog.youtube. The change taking effect 23 July 2021 for videos uploaded before 1 January 2017. Google / YouTube Help, "Older unlisted content," support.google.com/youtube/answer/9230970. Zhou, J., Li, Y., Adhikari, V. K. and Zhang, Z.-L. (2011), "Counting YouTube Videos via Random Prefix Sampling," Proceedings of the 2011 ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference. The earlier count, 500 million videos in May 2011, and the method that produced it. Vonderau, P. (2016), cited in McGrady et al. 2023 for the spread of third-party estimates, from 80 million to more than 3 billion. Selinger, E. and Hartzog, W. (2018), the source McGrady et al. cite for the phrase "privacy through obscurity". Zuckerman, E. (22 December 2023), "How Big Is YouTube?", ethanzuckerman.com. The team's own later restatement of the estimate, cited only where the script notes that the figure keeps moving. Credits Stock footage: Pexels, free licence. Diagrams and animations: original. Music: YouTube Audio Library.