Enthusiasts from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (USA) and the developer of the Pushshift service (which allows you to access the Reddit API to search for information) have teamed up to find out the number of public videos available on YouTube. To do this, they turned to the format of YouTube links: for example, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1sWMRaEahg .
The sequence after watch?v= consists of 11 characters. The first 10 can be lowercase or uppercase Latin letters (a-z, A-Z), numbers, — or _. The last sign is special: it has only 16 options. It turns out that a total of 18.4 quintillion combinations are possible (a quintillion has 18 zeros). There are a lot of videos on YouTube, but not that many.
If we assume that there are a billion videos on YouTube, then blindly going through the combinations will lead to a working link about once every 18.4 billion attempts. It's like hitting an empty bottle on the keyboard of a push-button phone and hoping that at some point you will still be connected to someone. But the method was accelerated thanks to scripts: the search is still routine, but at least automated.
The scripts allowed us to check 32 thousand links at the same time, and in a few months we managed to get about 10 thousand working links to videos. The authors calculated Dialing for Videos: A Random Sample of YouTube / Journal of Quantitative Description that approximately every 50 thousandth request was successful. Their sample allowed us to calculate that there are 13.325 billion publicly available videos on the platform. Analyzing the release dates of the found videos also allowed us to calculate how fast YouTube is growing. It turned out that in 2023 alone, about 4 billion videos were published on the platform.
The authors also noted that YouTube usually recommends videos with 10,000 or more views to users. At the same time, there were only 4% of such videos in their sample, and the median value was 39 views. They are going to further analyze the data: for example, calculate the ratio of languages on the platform.
