YouTube has quietly become a global economic and cultural juggernaut.
Teens’ 95% app
In August, Pew Research released a comprehensive survey of American teens and social media. It showed, among other things, that only a third of the youth use Facebook, while more than two-thirds use TikTok.
But the real outlier wasn’t TikTok—it was YouTube. A whopping 95% of teens surveyed said they use the video platform owned by Alphabet Inc.’s Google. More teens reported visiting YouTube “almost constantly” than they did any other app.
YouTube has been such a dominant force online for so long that it often slides under the radar, especially compared with buzzy companies like TikTok and scandal-plagued giants like Meta Platforms Inc. YouTube’s history and wild growth is the subject of my new book out Tuesday, Like, Comment, Subscribe.
Here are eight more numbers that underscore the platform’s stunning reach:
254%
That’s how much YouTube’s ad sales grew in the four years after 2017, a dark period for the company. At the time, YouTube was in a financial tailspin. Advertiser boycotts over extremist videos had sent the company scrambling to put in safeguards and make its business work. YouTube even considered ending revenue-sharing with creators altogether.
But it didn’t. The business bounced back—remarkably well. While concerns over extremism haven’t entirely gone away, YouTube brought in $28.8 billion last year alone.
325 million
In India, YouTube has nearly as many monthly active users—325 million—as the US has people. And this statistic is from 2020; it’s surely larger now.
India, a country with relatively low TV penetration, is the company’s biggest market by users in the world. It’s also a place where TikTok, a key rival, is banned. Doing business in the country comes with political challenges and commercial limitations. But for people there, as in several other emerging markets, YouTube remains the primary screen.
6.4 million
Alexey Navalny, Russia’s opposition leader, has more than 6 million YouTube subscribers. Russia is another big market for YouTube and, shockingly, it’s the only US media service to still operate there since the onset of the war in Ukraine. (Google and YouTube pulled their ads business from Russia but kept their main services.) While state critics like Navalny are big in the country, so was state-run media, like RT, until YouTube banned these channels after the invasion of Ukraine.
$4 billion
For the 12 months following April 2020, YouTube doled out $4 billion to the music industry, chiefly as revenue sharing from ads that rolled on music videos—an extraordinarily popular form. (“Despacito” has 7.9 billion views and counting.) YouTube says that more than 30% of these royalties went to independent creators, not record labels.
YouTube has struggled to turn this popularity into a streaming service on par with Spotify and Apple Music. But it’s still trying. YouTube is, as Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw has written, the “biggest music service in the world.”
572,117,085
This is the number of views YouTube star Cocomelon got during the last week of August, according to online publication Tubefilter, which regularly tracks the most popular YouTube channels. It’s an eye-opening list. Cocomelon, the nursery rhyme juggernaut, is the reigning champ, and regularly rakes in over 500 million views a week. Six of the top 10 channels by views are made for children, proof that kids entertainment—despite a regulatory crackdown—is still a mega-business online.
700 million
YouTube is a leader in the race for mobile screen time, but it’s also contender on televisions. In January, people watched more than 700 million hours of YouTube on smart TVs alone, according to the company. YouTube frequently calls TV its “fastest-growing screen,” a bat signal to advertisers. This year, the company made its first appearance at the so-called upfronts, TV’s biggest marketing confab. And HBO made the first episode of its big-budget series, “House of the Dragon,” available on YouTube for free.
2 million
Last year, YouTube announced that it was sharing ad sales with more than 2 million creators. That number was even higher before 2018, when YouTube added certain requirements for video monetization after a series of scandals. Still, today that’s 2 million YouTube channels with at least 1,000 subscribers and more than 4,000 hours of footage that people watch. The closest rival is TikTok, which is growing tremendously—but has had its share of political complications and creator backlash.
500
This one still boggles my mind. Every minute, at least 500 hours of footage are uploaded to YouTube. YouTube shared that figure in 2019. It’s definitely bigger now.
