How Many Videos Are on YouTube?

The Google-owned video sharing Web site is one of the top destinations online, allowing users to upload and share videos. There are definitely millions upon millions of videos on YouTube, but how many exactly are there?

Total Number

First off, an exact number doesn't really exist, as videos are constantly being uploaded or removed. Back in 2006, a Wall Street Journal article reported that YouTube hosted about 6 million videos. Last year, a YouTube search returned more than 80 million videos and 3 million user channels.

So, it's safe to say that the total number is currently well into 100 million videos.

More Than 600 Years Required

Ever wonder how long it would take to watch all the videos on YouTube? According to some statistics, if there are about 120 million videos, it would take well over 600 years to see all of them.

As for some other unofficial, but interesting bits of information, about 13 hours of content is uploaded every minute and an estimated 12 percent of YouTube videos are violating copyright.

Over 1 Billion Streams Per Day

According to data recently published by Internet marketing research company comScore, Google sites, including YouTube, ranked as the top U.S. video property with 6.8 billion videos viewed.

Meanwhile, Nielson reports that Google and YouTube streams 5.5 billion videos a month. However, TechCrunch says a source at Google puts the figure at above 1.2 billion a day worldwide.

Profitability?

As the Internet's most popular video site, YouTube's profitabilty has come under scrutiny many times before. Google doesn't reveal its exact numbers, and the estimates are simply based on available data.

The high costs of YouTube's bandwidth, content licensing, ad-revenue shares, hardware storage, sales, marketing, and other expenses may be to blame. According to some estimates, the site is set to lose almost $500 million this year alone.

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/09/youtube-video-streams-top-1-billionday/

http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2009/6/Americans_Viewed_a_Record_16.8_Billion_Videos_Online_in_April

http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/youtube-leads-video-streams-hulu-grows/

http://www.multichannel.com/article/191223-YouTube_May_Lose_470_Million_In_2009_Analysts.php

http://gdata.youtube.com/demo/index.html