At BBC Future, tech reporter Thomas Germain explains how some enterprising researchers probed some statistics for YouTube, that the Google franchise, does not provide information about:

How many YouTube videos are there? What are they about? What languages do YouTubers speak? As of 14 February 2025, the platform’s will have been running for 20 years. That is a lot of video. Yet we have no idea just how many there really are. Google knows the answers. It just won’t tell you.

Experts say that’s a problem. For all practical purposes, one of the most powerful communication systems ever created – a tool that provides a third of the world’s population with information and ideas – is operating in the dark.

“How a computer that ‘drunk dials’ videos is exposing YouTube’s secrets,” February 13, 2025

However, Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at the University of Massachusetts, and his colleagues developed a computer program to get some answers.

Here’s a bit from the Abstract from their paper at Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media:

To better understand YouTube as a whole, we created a random sample of videos using a new method. Through a description of the sample’s metadata, we provide answers to many essential questions about, for example, the distribution of views, comments, likes, subscribers, and categories. Our method also allows us to estimate the total number of publicly visible videos on YouTube and its growth over time. To learn more about video content, we hand-coded a subsample to answer questions like how many are primarily music, video games, or still images. Finally, we processed the videos’ audio using language detection software to determine the distribution of spoken languages.

Ryan McGrady et al, “Dialing for Videos: A Random Sample of YouTube,” Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media 3(2023), 1–85 10.51685/jqd.2023.022

So what did they find?

Zuckerman and his colleagues compared the number of videos they found to the number of guesses it took, and arrived an estimate: in 2022, they calculated that YouTube housed more than nine billion videos. By mid 2024, that number had grown to 14.8 billion videos, a 60% jump. “Exposing YouTube’s secrets”

But most of these vids are not pro products, like Mr. Beast:

The top YouTubers attract audiences in the hundreds of millions, but the researchers estimated the median number of views for a YouTube videos is just 41, and 4% of videos haven’t been watched a single time. About 74% of videos have zero comments. Around 89% have no likes. Typical YouTube videos aren’t just getting little attention it seems, they’re also very short. They assessed that the median YouTube video is only 64 seconds long, and more than a third of videos are less than 33 seconds long. “Exposing YouTube’s secrets”

A paltry 0.21% of YouTube videos were monetized.

In short, YouTube is a place where, in general, any individual can put up a video. Everything else that happens depends on whether that individual can find an audience. It’s not unlike the rest of the world in that regard.