The Growth of YouTube    

By all accounts, YouTube is the kind of Internet  business that   entrepreneurs and venture capitalists fantasize about: incredible growth followed by an exit north of a billion dollars. It doesn’t get better than that (well, at least until Whatsapp came along). YouTube relies on user-generated content, so let’s get a sense of the growth in videos uploaded to the platform:

Assuming the data I collected are representative of YouTube as a whole (again, see the methodology section), it’s clear that uploading continues to grow apace. 2015 isn’t even over yet, but the number of videos uploaded this year already far exceeds 2014 (which beat 2013, and so on).

What about views over the same timeframe? Unfortunately, you can’t calculate this statistic with the data I collected because, for a given video, views are given as all-time. That is, you know the total but you don’t know when those views occurred. For example, take a video published on January 23, 2006 with 100 views: those views could have happened entirely on the day it was uploaded or gradually from then to now. I came up with this chart instead, which shows the share of all views from each year’s uploads:

This chart is fascinating and counterintuitive. Why would 2009’s videos have more views that 2010’s? Did they turn out to be more popular? Likewise, we can see that 2015 is lagging behind 2014. I collected this data October 27-30, 2015, which is about 4/5 of the way through the year. If this trend holds, 2015’s videos will not surpass 2014’s in views. Of course, 2015 could eventually catch up. But then again, 2010’s videos haven’t yet surpassed 2009’s.

Feel free to speculate about this finding in the comments section below: it would be great to hear various theories as to why this could be true. This result definitely violates my expectations: I would anticipate YouTube’s usage to be at its zenith, and for most videos to be watched shortly after they are uploaded.