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                              How Big Is YouTube?

   Adam Engst

   [1]This is fascinating. In an attempt to determine how many videos
   there are on YouTube, researchers Ethan Zuckerman and Jason Baumgartner
   came up with a clever approach they call "drunk dialing." Because
   YouTube URLs have an 11-character string that follows specific rules,
   there are 18.4 quintillion possible YouTube addresses. The researchers
   tried a few million random guesses and used the number of hits to
   calculate a percentage. Multiplying that percentage against the
   possible total provided an estimated number of actual videos available:
   currently 13.325 billion. Since their crawler gathers metadata about
   each hit, they can also estimate things like YouTube's growth rate (4
   billion videos posted in 2023). Check their [2]TubeStats site for
   additional insights about language, views, length, number of
   subscribers, likes, comments, and more.

   [3]Read original article

References

   1. https://ethanzuckerman.com/2023/12/22/how-big-is-youtube/
   2. https://tubestats.org/
   3. https://ethanzuckerman.com/2023/12/22/how-big-is-youtube/

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