An Overview Of A Day On YouTube

A recent look at a day in the life of YouTube by Pexeso is extremely illuminating. First of all, it’s not as music-centric as it was previously, with only 5% of its videos now dedicated to music. Those amounted to 11% of total views, which comes in 4th behind gaming, entertainment, and people and blogs. Another eye-opening stat is that more than 93% of the videos are in English, and that the 3 major labels rank 2, 3 and 4 among the number of take-down notices issued.

Here’s an overview of the data. You can find a very nice infographic here.

Brief overview of statistics of 1 YouTube day:

• YouTube receives roughly 300,000 individual video uploads each day, amounting to 80k hours of video and 24TB of data.
• 8am PST is the busiest time of day for video uploads, whereas 12:36am is the least busy. Approximately 10x more videos are uploaded during the busiest time comparing to the least busy.
• The average video uploaded to YouTube is 15 minutes long and 86MB in size.
• 93.5% of videos uploaded to YouTube are in English.
• The People & Blogs category receives the highest volume of uploads, accounting for a whopping 41% of videos uploaded everyday, followed by Gaming (14%), Film & Action (10%) and Entertainment (8%).
• Although the People & Blogs category accounts for the most video uploads each day, Gaming is king, receiving the most attention.
• Static videos — typically spammy videos containing just a static image whose purpose is to lure people outside of YouTube — account for unbelievable 7.5% of all uploaded videos.

What happens to videos after they’re uploaded?

• Only 35% of all videos uploaded will be claimed by rights holders. 26% will be monitored or monetized by the copyright holder; the remainder will be taken down.
• A whopping 32% of all videos will end up removed within the first 24 hours.
• 5% of videos will be deleted by users.
• 18% will be removed because the user had their account terminated.
• 9% will be taken down due to copyright infringement.
• 0.4% of all videos are made private by the users in the first 24 hours.
• 5% accounts that uploads videos in any given day get terminated for violating YouTube’s TOS.
• Terminated accounts upload around 20% of all videos every day, 6x more than a typical account.

Any perceptions of YouTube as a platform that’s dominated by music are shattered by this study. Indeed, video does account for 74% of all Internet traffic, but music is just a small piece of it.