Google acquired YouTube in October of 2006, just a year and eight months since launch. YouTube was on to something special, their user base had exploded and the number of videos uploaded every minute of every day was skyrocketing.
For $1.65 billion, it is clear Google got a great deal in the YouTube platform. It is now the second most visited website in the world and second-largest search engine in the world, only behind its parent company Google.
Need a quick answer?
- There are 3.01 billion videos on YouTube as of August 2019.
How did we come up with that number? See below for the ingenious trick to pull the data from Google’s very own servers.
Videos Uploaded On YouTube
- 1,914 videos are uploaded to YouTube every second
- 114,833 videos are uploaded to YouTube every minute
- 6.89 million videos are uploaded to YouTube every hour
- 61.2 million videos are uploaded to YouTube every day
- 224 million videos are uploaded to YouTube every week
- 567 million videos are uploaded to YouTube every month
How Many Videos Are On YouTube
Lack Of Consensus
Unfortunately, if you look around for the number of YouTube videos in total, there most people simply guess. The consensus is that, well, it’s a lot.
The line above from Quora is as good of a straightforward answer as you get when browsing around.
Trick To Tell The Total Number Of YouTube Videos
Thankfully, we have a little trick up our sleeve to determine exactly how many videos are on YouTube. The best part of all the data comes directly from Google!
The tools we’ll use here come from Google itself and their advanced search operators. Google has all sorts of great operators that allow you to change how you search and specify certain criteria in a search.
In this case, where we want to find the total number of videos on YouTube, we’ll use Google’s “site” operator.
First, we will do a “site:YouTube.com” search and see what comes up:
What you see above is a compilation of all the pages Google has indexed from the domain YouTube.com. In total, Google has indexed about 3.4 billion pages on YouTube as of August 18, 2019.
BUT, we’re not interested in all the pages on YouTube since it would include help pages, channels, playlists, etc. We need to figure out a way to narrow it down to just the number of videos on YouTube.
Let’s do a bit of digging. After looking at a dozen or so videos I started to see that there was a helpful trend. Every YouTube video appears to start with “https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=” and then a string of numbers and letters. This is VERY helpful.
Let’s try this again but using a more specific site operator. Let’s search for “site:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=”
Try it yourself: site:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
Perfect! This is exactly what we wanted. Google returned every single YouTube video they have in their index. Of course, this number is rounded a bit but overall gives us the best and most accurate number out there. So, we can conclude:
How many videos are on YouTube? 3.01 Billion videos are on YouTube as of August 2019.
How Many Videos Are Uploaded To YouTube Every Day?
We can use the exact same technique as above to determine how many YouTube videos are uploaded every day.
What we’ll use is a similar site operator as before, “site:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=” but with the filter for the past 24 hours. This means we want Google to pull all the YouTube videos they’ve indexed in the past 24 hours to give a rough estimate of daily videos uploaded.
Unfortunately, it looks like we have a problem. When we activate the filter to set for the past 24 hours only we don’t see how many total results there are. But, we can do another neat trick to find that information.
What I figured is maybe the information is still loaded into the page source HTML but just not displayed. I WAS RIGHT!
So here we go, we have the answer!
61.2 million videos are uploaded to YouTube every day.
Using the same technique, let’s dig down and get the number of YouTube videos uploaded per second, minute hour, week, and month.
- 1,914 videos are uploaded to YouTube every second
- 114,833 videos are uploaded to YouTube every minute
- 6.89 million videos are uploaded to YouTube every hour
- 224 million videos are uploaded to YouTube every week
- 567 million videos are uploaded to YouTube every month
How Many YouTube Videos Are Not Captured In The Estimate?
Note, there, of course, some caveats to this number that we’ll discuss and try to work through. One clear and obvious factor that would skew the total number of videos is unlisted or private videos.
I did a quick test with one of my unlisted videos and indeed, it is not indexed by Google.
Thus, it’s clear that both unlisted and private videos are NOT indexed by Google and therefore are NOT included in the approximately 3.01 billion videos noted above.
The unfortunate truth is, there’s no real way to know how many YouTube videos exist and are set to private or unlisted in the settings. Only Google would have that information, which they haven’t released for obvious reasons.
Another potential factor that could skew that number is if some YouTube videos don’t begin with https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= and then a string of numbers and letters. If you do a “site:https://www.youtube.com/watch” search it returns the same results, which makes me think this is a pretty good catch-all for YouTube videos.
Fun YouTube Video Facts
- There are 327.2 million people in the United States. Every person in the United States would have to watch more than 9 videos to watch the entire YouTube video library.
- The rate of YouTube video growth is faster than the human population growth.
- 500 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute as of May 2019.
- YouTube videos are most often watched to see music videos or listen to music, with over 2/3 of Americans using YouTube to listen to music since Feb 2017.
This math seems very off to me. After the hour stat for uploads, it makes no sense at all. IF it is an average, than your “total uploads a month” is off by a factor of 816.6%.