How big is YouTube?

Researchers Derek Ruths' team estimated YouTube has about 13.325 billion videos, using a method of randomly guessing video URLs rather than relying on platform samples. The team, including Ryan McGrady, Kevin Zheng, Rebecca Curran, Jason Baumgartner and the author, found the approach yielded a hit roughly every 50,000 tries, with the estimate updated every few weeks at tubestats.org. The article reports that over 4 billion videos were posted in 2023 alone, and that videos with 10,000 or more views make up about 4% of the sample but most of the platform's views. The median video has 39 views.