How Big is YouTube? – Ethan Zuckerman
Note
it is very big.
the method is fascinating, though it calls into question if social networks should be responsible for providing this data more openly.
Published
2023
Summary
The author discusses the difficulty of accurately determining the size of YouTube and details a novel methodology involving "drunk dialing" random URLs to estimate the platform's scale. The research involved collecting over 10,000 random YouTube videos to analyze various aspects of the platform, including video age, view counts, and language distribution. The findings suggest YouTube is significantly larger than previously thought and that the "long tail" of user-generated content is substantial. The author also touches upon the ethical considerations involved in handling the collected data.