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One Billion Hours of YouTube Are Watched Every Day (thenextweb.com) 72

Posted by BeauHD from the that's-a-lot-of-zeros dept.
YouTube announced in a blog post that people around the world are now watching a billion hours of YouTube videos every single day. According to YouTube, "If you were to sit and watch a billion hours of YouTube, it would take you over 100,000 years." Mashable reports: The milestone "represents the enjoyment of the fantastically diverse videos that creative people make every single day," Cristos Goodrow, VP of engineering at YouTube, wrote in a blog post Monday. "Around the world, people are spending a billion hours every day rewarding their curiosity, discovering great music, keeping up with the news, connecting with their favorite personalities, or catching up with the latest trend." The 1 billion figure is a 10-fold increase since 2012, YouTube said. The statistic is one that underscores YouTube's efforts to dominate the digital space. On YouTube -- which operates under the motto "Broadcast Yourself" -- users upload 400 hours of video each minute, or 65 years of video a day.
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One Billion Hours of YouTube Are Watched Every Day

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  • One Billion Hours of YouTube Are Watched Every Day. And some of them don't involve cats.

  • This is the solution to automatization! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    We keep asking ourselves what we're gonna do when robots take over our jobs. Watch Youtube, of course!

    Perhaps state allocations should be made dependent on the watched hours per week or something.

  • It's better than TV (Score:5, Interesting)

    by kkoo ( 4352157 ) on Tuesday February 28, 2017 @07:03AM (#53944815)
    I don't watch any TV broadcasts. I only watch content I've discovered or followed on Youtube. I doubt I'm the only one.

  • I'm on Youtube all day (Score:5, Interesting)

    by BlackPignouf ( 1017012 ) on Tuesday February 28, 2017 @07:58AM (#53944923)

    I'm on Youtube all day at work, but I don't watch anything, I just listen to the music.

  • Sounds quite impossible (Score:4, Informative)

    by wvmarle ( 1070040 ) on Tuesday February 28, 2017 @08:38AM (#53945025)

    According to YouTube they have about 1 billion unique users a month. So if all were using YouTube every day, that would mean on average one hour of YouTube watching every single day. Still quite possible, but only if those users all visit YouTube every day, and it's an average, so many people watch much more than that. For me, few days pass without YouTube but normally not more than 5-10 minutes or so, mostly linked from my Facebook news feed, and sometimes tutorials and so. More than an hour in a day is rare.

    However, according to this web site [fortunelords.com], some 30 million users use YouTube every day, and 6 billion hours a month. I don't know where they get their statistics, but the daily total is only 1/5 of the YouTube statistic given above. 30 million a day is indeed nearly 1 billion a month, so that's a sensible number, based on how you count "unique users", of course. Many of those will be repeat users. Anyway, at 30 million visitors a day, each visitor has to watch 33.3 hours of video a day. That's impossible - at least in my world, where a day contains just 24 hours. If that number is also off by a factor of 5, it'd be nearly 7 hours a day, on average. Even with a full zero missing for the daily visitors number, it'd be on average over 3 hours of video per user.

    No matter how I try to look at this number, it just doesn't make sense.

    • I am one of many who watch YouTube for many hours a day. Err did I saw watch? I meant listen. I typically disk in some video which has a many hour mix of music with a still image in the background and then minimise.

      I'm sure I'm not the only one but I will easily clock more than 6 hours a day, and that's not taking into account watching TV series or other things on you tube. Entire seasons of robot chicken, QI most of the entertainment stuff from HBO, the amount of content on the which can replace TV viewing

  • obligatory (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    In Trump's America, Youtube watches you!

  • If you were to sit and watch a billion hours of YouTube, it would take you over 100,000 years.

    Eh, I bet I can do that in 60,000 years, tops.

  • Does this include those pesky video ads included on web-pages to slow them down? Or are they served from elsewhere (not embedded)?

  • I wonder how much of this is uploads of copyrighted RIAA music? It seems to be a 50-50 split to me of bootleg concert footage and illicit rips. Not that I care, but YouTube is one of the main platforms that millennials use to consume their content, including music, so it's interesting to see where this is going or if / when the RIAA will start screaming for everything to be taken down as they continue to become less relevant.
    • They get their cut of the ads and seem to have given up, as far as I can tell. A number of labels put up official videos as it is.
  • How many are watched all the way through? Or even more than 15s.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by l20502 ( 4813775 )
      If you're using ublock origin or the notwork monitor you'll notice that the youtube player regularly sends back playback status and events

  • No (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    They get streamed. Embedded videos are counted, they are everwhere, and they auto play. The average user has no idea what is going on or how to stop it. This as disengenuous as a lot of advertising click-through data. Whatever, try again, Silicon Valley. Someday they will realize when it's too late that big data is actually a false friend and not to be relied on in it's gross misrepresentations of reality.

  • tubalcain (Score:3)

    by PopeRatzo ( 965947 ) on Tuesday February 28, 2017 @10:55AM (#53945659) Journal

    My favorite YouTube videos at the moment are the ones by machinists. I have no aptitude or experience in this area, but for some reason I find it relaxing to watch machinists work while describing what they're doing. I also have no plans to actually do any machinist stuff, but I find the videos absorbing. I also like to watch fishing videos even though I do not fish.

    Here's one that's particularly meditative for me. It's well-known YouTube machinist "tubalcain" giving a tour of his tool box.

    https://youtu.be/rvM_SRrvvHo [youtu.be]

    • I also have no plans to actually do any machinist stuff, but I find the videos absorbing.

      Harbor freight has a small desktop lathe that's supposed to be quite good. And a desktop mill that you install under a drill press, which is also supposed to be pretty good if you take it apart and de-burr it like they should have. Maybe it would be an entertaining hobby. I mean, what are you going to do when Slashdot finally implodes?

      • I mean, what are you going to do when Slashdot finally implodes?

        I will fall to my knees in the sand and cry, “YOU BLEW IT UP! DAMN YOU! GOD DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!”

  • the biggest time waster since time began.

  • Staggering amount of bandwidth (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    720p30 h264 video with reasonable audio ends up being roughly 1-1.5GiB/hour. We'll just say 1.5GiB since it's probably the case that it's skewed toward the upper end since I think people mostly want better quality video if it's available or the best quality that their connection will tolerate. I'm sure a lot of those hours are on lower resolutions and a lot are on higher resolutions.

    At 1.5GiB an hour, we'd be looking at 1.5 billion GiB per day. Puts us roughly around 1.4EiB per day. I can only imagine what

  • Don't sleep, the clowns will eat me.

  • I'm just downloading a local copy for my flight.

  • I can take a hint, time to get back to work.

  • It's not true that "If you were to sit and watch a billion hours of YouTube, it would take you over 100,000 years." YouTube did not DeDup the videos; if the billion hours were all of one video, then it would only take an hour to watch those billion hours. A more interesting take would be how many different videos are watched (w and w/o porn). Sometimes
    1) repetition would be interesting (most popular cat video, or porn), and
    2) maybe some scientific or how-to videos are important even if they are only se

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