Ethan Zuckerman: “How Big is YouTube?”

Here’s how this works: YouTube URLs look like this: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=vXPJVwwEmiM

That bit after “watch?v=” is an 11 digit string. The first ten digits can be a-z,A-Z,0-9 and _-. The last digit is special, and can only be one of 16 values. Turns out there are 2^64 possible YouTube addresses, an enormous number: 18.4 quintillion. There are lots of YouTube videos, but not that many. Let’s guess for a moment that there are 1 billion YouTube videos – if you picked URLs at random, you’d only get a valid address roughly once every 18.4 billion tries.

We refer to this method as “drunk dialing”, as it’s basically as sophisticated as taking swigs from a bottle of bourbon and mashing digits on a telephone, hoping to find a human being to speak to. Jason found a couple of cheats that makes the method roughly 32,000 times as efficient, meaning our “phone call” connects lots more often. Kevin Zheng wrote a whole bunch of scripts to do the dialing, and over the course of several months, we collected more than 10,000 truly random YouTube videos.

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Once you’re collecting these random videos, other statistics are easy to calculate. We can look at how old our random videos are and calculate how fast YouTube is growing: we estimate that over 4 billion videos were posted to YouTube just in 2023. We can calculate the mean and median views per video, and show just how long the “long tail” is – videos with 10,000 or more views are roughly 4% of our data set, though they represent the lion’s share of views of the YouTube platform.

Ethan Zuckerman

Fascinating method – and fascinating results! If these are anywhere near accurate, in 2023 there was a new YouTube video for every other person living on the planet! The stats also highlight the extreme inequality in traffic between a tiny minority of popular uploads and the typical YouTube video, which can’t even top 10,000 views.

The Verge: “YouTube is axing its ad-free Premium Lite subscription plan”

At €6.99 per month, YouTube’s Premium Lite plan first launched in select European countries in 2021, including Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden. It offers ad-free viewing across YouTube’s spectrum of apps and formats but doesn’t come with Premium’s other features like offline downloads, background playback, or any YouTube Music benefits.

But soon, existing Premium Lite subscribers will be left with two options: go back to watching YouTube with ads or subscribe to the pricier YouTube Premium that also includes YouTube Music. In an email notifying users of the change, YouTube says it will offer Lite subscribers a one-month free trial of YouTube Premium, regardless of whether they’ve had a trial before. It notes that subscribers will need to cancel their Lite subscription or wait for it to be canceled in order to redeem the offer. YouTube raised the price of its Premium and Music subscriptions in the US in July.

Antonio G. Di Benedetto

This ‘Premium Lite’ plan does indeed sound like the best YouTube subscription for me. I subscribed to YouTube Premium at the start of the year because I was offered a couple of months free of charge with my purchase of a new Samsung Galaxy smartphone, and continued because I was increasingly annoyed by YouTube ads long before that and couldn’t stand the thought of returning to forced ad breaks. The most obnoxious for me were the ads that would sometimes pop up five seconds into the video – you did not even get a chance to see what the video was about before getting interrupted! I never used the other features included in the plan, such as offline downloads and background playback, so a basic ad-free plan without any added features would have been perfect.

Variety: “YouTube expands Multi-Language Audio Tracks”

The multi-language audio feature lets creators add dubbing to new and existing videos, helping them expand their global reach and reach new audiences for their channels, according to YouTube. In early tests with a “handful” of creators, including MrBeast, YouTube has seen more than 3,500 multi-language videos uploaded in 40-plus languages as of January 2023. Creators testing multi-language dubbed videos saw more than 15% of their watch time coming from views in the video’s non-primary language in January, according to YouTube.

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To use YouTube’s multi-language dubbing feature, when uploading a video to their channel, eligible creators can add different audio tracks through the Subtitles Editor tool. Existing content in creators’ catalogs can be updated with additional audio tracks as well. If you’re a viewer, just click the video’s settings to see what audio tracks are available to start watching in another language. In addition, content with multiple language tracks will default to match viewers’ preferred language and users will be able to search for multilingual content via translated video titles and descriptions.

Todd Spangler

This actually sounds like a perfect use case for AI voice synthesis and various adjacent tools: record the primary audio track normally in the creator’s main language, automatically transcribe and translate it to a selection of additional languages (the creator may optionally double-check the quality of the transcription and tweak the translation, provided he knows the target language), and finally generate new audio tracks in these languages in the creator’s own voice.

Follow Creators in Microsoft Edge

Continuing a string of various, more or less useful updates, Microsoft Edge has introduced the ability to follow creators directly in the browser. When vising creator profiles on supported sites, the browser temporarily shows a prompt in the address bar to ‘Follow’ said username; after the prompt fades, it leaves behind a permanent button to follow/unfollow next to the Favorites star. By default you will receive notifications whenever these creators post new content via a popup next to the Collections button. From this popup you can navigate to the new post, snooze the notification, or manage these updates in a separate sidebar. The browser also added two new settings entries to control the feature, available in the section ‘Privacy, search, and services’: here you can enable or disable both the notifications and the address bar prompts to follow new creators.

The Guardian: “‘It’s the way the industry is going’: how YouTube is transforming podcasting”

A study by market research firm Cumulus published in May found YouTube is already the most popular platform for podcasts. It won the market without really trying; now, it’s getting serious. The company has launched a dedicated beta podcast landing page, hired a podcast executive to lead its efforts in the medium and offered popular podcasters and podcast networks grants of up to $300,000 to create video versions of their shows, according to Bloomberg.

It’s a sign of growing competition in the space that’s bad news for Spotify, which has invested about $1bn in podcasting in recent years. Even Gen Z’s beloved short-form video platform TikTok is thinking about launching a music service that would cover podcasts.

Much like the tendency of distantly related crustaceans to keep evolving into crabs, sooner or later platforms have a tendency to start cannibalising each other’s core features. This time, a medium is caught in the crossfire – raising the question of what differentiates a video podcast from the vlogs that YouTube first popularised.

Laurie Clarke

A common issue with platforms adding additional features is that after a point it starts having diminishing returns in terms of user experience. In the specific case of video podcasts I would even argue that a video component can actively diminish the experience of listening to a podcast. I listen to podcasts mostly in the background, while I’m doing chores around the house or while roaming around the city; in other words, when my ears are free to follow the discussion, while my eyes are paying attention to other things. Having to follow a visual story along with the audio track would be highly distracting to downright impossible – for example when crossing the street – so I would rather stop listening to podcasts than switch to video. I’m sure this applies to many other people and situations as well – you probably don’t want to stare at a screen while driving, but you might easily listen to a podcast, just as you would an audiobook or music.

Bloomberg: “Who is MrBeast? Meet YouTube’s Top Creator of 2020”

Then, one day, he was struck with an idea for a video that he was sure would work. It was as simple as counting. Donaldson sat down in a chair and, for the the next 40-plus hours, murmured one number after the next, starting from zero and continuing all the way to 100,000. At the end of the exhausting stunt, he looked deliriously at the camera. What am I doing with my life? he said.

It was an oddly mesmerizing performance, the kind of thing every kid in elementary school thinks about but never tries. The resulting video — entitled “I Counted To 100,000!” — was a viral smash. Since its debut on Jan. 8, 2017, it has earned over 21 million views.

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Donaldson now generates tens of millions of dollars in advertising sales from his social media feeds, which include his main channel, a gaming channel and pages on other social media sites. He invests almost every dollar back into his business. In recent years, his average cost of making a single video has climbed to $300,000 from $10,000. Money is a vehicle to do bigger videos and make better content, he said.

To date, his priciest video cost $1.2 million. In it, he promised to give $1 million to the contestant who could keep his hand on a stack of cash for the longest period of time. In the end, he felt bad for the three people who didn’t get the $1 million, so he gave them some money too.

Lucas Shaw & Mark Bergen

Interesting insight into the so-called ‘creator economy’, and how much effort is needed to become a YouTube hit and start earning serious money. Granted, this is an extreme example, but will increasing competition, each creator has to invest more and more time and resources to stand out from the rest. A similar dynamic is unfolding on Instagram, where engagement is apparently tied to specific goals and consistent posts across all their formats. For the average creator, these levels of efforts can quickly become unsustainable.

Chris Zacharias: “A Conspiracy to Kill IE6”

The first person to come by our desks was the PR team lead. He was a smart, dapper man who was always bubbling with energy and enthusiasm. Except this time. This time he was uncharacteristically prickly. He had come in on an otherwise normal day to find email from every major tech news publication asking why the second largest website on the planet was threatening to cut off access to nearly a fifth of its user base. Fortunately for us, the publications had already settled on a narrative that this was a major benefit to the Internet. By their call, YouTube was leading the charge towards making the web a faster, safer experience for all of its users. The entire PR team had Macs running Chrome and could not even see what we had done, let alone issue comments to the press on any of it. They were caught completely unaware. We eagerly told them everything about what we had launched and helped them craft the necessary talking points to expand on the narrative already established by the media. Satisfied that he could get back in front of the story, the PR team lead turned and warned us to never do anything like this without telling him first. He did not want to let great public relations opportunities like this slip by ever again.

Chris Zacharias

Speaking of dirty tactics used by Google to undermine Microsoft, the above article is a good example – admittedly focused on IE6, but I’m sure over time many more similar stories will surface. What’s insidious and concerning about this is how engineers simply decided to do this on their own, how the tech press then mindlessly applauded the move – see also the excited replies to the author’s tweet linking to the blog post – and the lack of corrective action inside Google, because it benefited them to hurt a competitor. This is the perfect reflection of tech giant culture: move fast and break things – no pause to consider external consequences, only personal and corporate gain – and one of the main reasons why tech monopolies need to be closely scrutinized and more heavily regulated.

The Verge: “Stadia is about the future of YouTube, not gaming”

Yesterday, Google announced plans for a new game-streaming service called Stadia. Besides the logo, the controller, and a single game — Doom Eternal — the announcement left us with more questions than answers. Primary in my mind has been the query of why Google needs to be in the gaming business at all. Isn’t it enough to dominate web search, ads, and browsers, smartphone operating systems, and maps? What part of our lives does Google not want to know about? And then it dawned on me that we might be looking at it from the wrong perspective: what if Stadia isn’t a case of Google aggressively entering a new business sphere, but rather a defensive one to protect its existing kingdom?

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Yes, it’s cute that Google printed the Konami code on the underside of its Stadia controller, but look at the unique buttons the company has put on the top: one is for Google Assistant and the other is for screen capture. Those are your Google priorities printed in crisp white iconography atop a smooth black surface. The capture button is there to make sharing to YouTube as effortless and frictionless as possible, while the Assistant’s inclusion is there to help gamers stuck on a level find guides or tips on YouTube without having to leave their gaming session.

Vlad Savov

I have to say, I was rather impressed with the concept of Stadia. I’m not much of a gamer (although I spend too much time hitting ‘one more turn’ in Civilization), but something like this could radically change the gaming experience, especially in multiplayer, where virtual environments could accept many more players for more complex and engaging interactions.

The New York Times: “Sundar Pichai of Google: ‘Technology doesn’t solve Humanity’s Problems’”

How do you approach this in China, where Google is considering returning to the market with a search engine?

One of the things that’s not well understood, I think, is that we operate in many countries where there is censorship. When we follow “right to be forgotten” laws, we are censoring search results because we’re complying with the law. I’m committed to serving users in China. Whatever form it takes, I actually don’t know the answer. It’s not even clear to me that search in China is the product we need to do today.

David Gelles

A very disingenuous comparison: the EU ‘right to be forgotten’ gives power to individuals to remove certain pieces of online content (not even remove actually, just request to be removed), whereas Chinese censorship operates top-down, giving an authoritarian government power over the information its citizens can access online. If you can’t tell the difference between these two, maybe you should not be in charge of a corporation with immense global power.

Polygon: “Wikipedia won’t fix YouTube’s problems”

“We have four freedoms under which YouTube operates: freedom of expression, freedom of opportunity, freedom to belong and freedom of information,” Kyncl said, reiterating comments he made to YouTuber Casey Neistat in February. “They truly become our North Star during difficult times. [...] Our message is that we absolutely are leaning in to freedom of information and freedom of expression, subject to our community guidelines.

“We don’t intend to be on one side or another.”

There’s a difference, however, between someone talking about their conservative beliefs and someone spreading malignant lies under the pretense of news. This is where the company now finds itself: not wanting to take a stance and relying on user-edited Wikipedia articles to try and outweigh its riskiest content.

Julia Alexander

Main problem with this approach, as noted in the article as well, is that most people watching the videos will simply ignore the Wikipedia snippet. YouTube’s interface itself makes it easy to ignore, as people frequently watch in full screen; when you finish a video and click on a recommended video, it plays in full screen as well, hiding its description and any associated fact check.

Baekdal: “You can’t compare Facebook and YouTube Views”

The way Facebook does videos is like that of an outdoor billboard. As you walk down the street, you look at its direction and you might get influenced by it. But you weren’t looking for what that billboard had to offer, nor did you really have an intent on acting on it. It just happened to cross your field of view.

This is not a bad thing, per see, because that billboard did the job of creating exposure, and we know that exposure is one of the many important elements of branding. But it’s still just exposure.

YouTube views, on the other hand, are more like when you walk into a restaurant and you look at the menu. You see 25 different things you can buy, and you finally decide that you are going to try the number 4 sandwich. In this case, the level of exposure for each item is much lower, but for that one item you picked, the value is many times higher.

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Facebook is wonderful for many things, but it’s designed around that one behavior that I call the break. YouTube creators are designed more around the behaviors I call the story, the passion and the recline.

Thomas Baekdal

Very interesting article, a must-read in the middle of accusations that Facebook is lying and stealing their way to online video domination. It’s certainly amusing to see Facebook being accused of copyright infringement seeing that YouTube started much the same way. It’s too early to tell how this will play out, but I don’t think YouTube’s long-form creators will be threatened by Facebook video in the long run. With it’s massive selection, YouTube is the new television, while Facebook is the commercial break.

Hunter Walk: “The Time when YouTube eliminated Pay Bias for its Product Managers”

We were months away from any annual review process but when looking over the salary data we saw something troubling. Many of our high performers weren’t necessarily at the high side of their salary band. Why? Any variety of reasons but most had to do with what their Year One salary was at Google and whether they were aggressive negotiators of salary during performance reviews or off-cycle because of competitive job offers.

So what did we do to those high achievers who were being paid same or less than their peers? We bumped their salary to the max of their current level. Over time, their performance trajectory would have fixed any imbalances – they’d be promoted faster, get more stock, etc but that wasn’t the point. Our nearterm goal was for our best product managers to know that we never wanted them to feel undervalued and that they could trust our desire to invest in them. In my opinion, the dollars we spent in off-cycle salary changes repaid themselves 10x in retention and moral.

Hunter Walk

I’ve had the opposite experience at one of my previous workplaces: I was among the first hired and teaching newer colleagues the processes, when I accidentally found out they received about twice my salary. When I talked to my manager about this and an eventual raise, it quickly became clear that the company had no intention of fixing these imbalances, not for me, nor anyone else. And in the regular performance review system it would have taken me years to get to the pay level of these new hires.

Needless to say, I didn’t stick around very long…

The New York Times: “YouTube’s Chief, Hitting a New ‘Play’ Button”

Ms. Wojcicki runs a media company that has been valued at $40 billion, yet her office has none of the expected trappings — no bronze statuettes or pictures of her posing with movie stars. On her bookshelf is a photograph of her oldest son’s recent bar mitzvah and a small box filled with her various business cards from Google. (She was employee No. 16.) She flipped through the cards nostalgically, remembering an early task as the company’s first marketing manager: redesigning Google’s logo. (She changed the typeface and removed an exclamation point.)

Jonathan Mahler

The difference between a booming business and a struggling one: knowing when to drop the exclamation mark!

Advertising Age: “Facebook’s Strategy to Take on YouTube Comes Into View”

But for an ad-supported business like Facebook, views are only as valuable as the revenue they generate. While YouTube videos viewed on Facebook contributed some percentage of the estimated $5.6 billion YouTube reaped last year, Facebook didn’t make a cent.

That may be why Facebook is shining a light on its own video player privately in meetings with online video execs and now publicly with its view count. Coupled with its acquisition of video ad-tech firm LiveRail and introduction of autoplay video ads, Facebook appears poised to make a run at YouTube’s business. In one big way it already has.

Tim Peterson

I’m sure Facebook would love to get a piece of the online video ads pie, but I think there are several factors working against it.

The recent changes to the newsfeed ranking algorithm have emphasized content from ‘friends’, reducing the reach of pages, to their discontent. If publishers have to pay Facebook first to insure their videos rank highly in peoples’ newsfeeds, this will reduce their revenues from advertising on Facebook, making it less lucrative to contribute. Of course, Facebook could always change the ranking algorithm again to push its native videos (there are some suggestions it already does), but that could annoy people, especially on mobile. You have to take into account that, unlike YouTube, Facebook is not a dedicated video portal, so video content has to compete with a number of other updates, especially friends’ photos.

Microsoft on the Issues: “The limits of Google’s openness”

We know that this has been frustrating, to say the least, for our customers. We have always had one goal: to provide our users a YouTube experience on Windows Phone that’s on par with the YouTube experience available to Android and iPhone users. Google’s objections to our app are not only inconsistent with Google’s own commitment of openness, but also involve requirements for a Windows Phone app that it doesn’t impose on its own platform or Apple’s (both of which use Google as the default search engine, of course). David Howard

It’s hard to understand Google’s behavior on this issue: on one hand they announced several times they have no intention of developing apps for Windows Phone, on the other they are preventing Microsoft from building an app of their own, while allowing third party apps that don’t follow the same rules that Microsoft supposedly breaks. If Windows Phone is such an insignificant platform, why go to all that trouble to block it? In any case, given the position of the author (Corporate Vice President & Deputy General Counsel, Litigation & Antitrust), I’m sure this won’t be the last we hear of this…

So is Google in a snit because the Windows Phone WebBrowser control blocks third party cookies by default?

— Simon Bisson (@sbisson) August 15, 2013

iOS-like progress bars in desktop YouTube

As some have rightfully noticed, iOS remains the first choice for developers when it comes to launching apps or testing new designs. Two of the most recent examples include Flickr – who launched their iOS app first and followed up with the Android app and a desktop redesign – and Google with the new Maps design. I recently noticed another example on YouTube: while loading a new video or a search page, the site shows a thin progress bar underneath the address bar, just like the one found in Chrome for iOS and in the Google Search app. The color is different – a red hue to match YouTube’s logo – but the concept is similar. For now it only shows up while using Chrome, but it will probably extend to other desktop browsers soon.

The Wall Street Journal: “Forget CDs. Teens Are Tuning Into YouTube”

Among adults, the most popular ways to listen to music were radio (67%), CDs (61%), YouTube (44%), Pandora's custom-radio service (32%) and Apple Inc.'s iTunes (29%). Among 13-to-17 year olds, YouTube was the most popular way to listen to music, with 64% using it. Radio was next, with 56%, followed by iTunes (53%), CDs (50%) and Pandora (35%).

Nielsen executives said that the listening patterns, particularly the massive popularity of YouTube, show that record companies will need to stay nimble in a changing world. What is the revenue they're getting per stream? said David Bakula, a senior executive in Nielsen's entertainment-measurement division. It's not the $10 they got for a CD. Ethan Smith

Sounds about right. I’m way into the “adult” demographic and I already listen more music on YouTube than radio or CDs. It’s not only “free” (as in ‘ad-supported’), but you can also choose the music you listen from a very wide selection and discover new artists; you get new music releases very quickly, even before they hit radios, and all this practically everywhere you have a (decent) Internet connection. What’s not to like about that? YouTube is turning out to be one of the best acquisitions of Google, one that will become even more relevant – and profitable – in the future.

Google Research Blog: “Quantifying comedy on YouTube”

Raw viewcount on its own is insufficient as a ranking metric since it is biased by video age and exposure. We noticed that viewers emphasize their reaction to funny videos in several ways: e.g. capitalization (LOL), elongation (loooooool), repetition (lolololol), exclamation (lolllll!!!!!), and combinations thereof. If a user uses an “loooooool” vs an “loool”, does it mean they were more amused? We designed features to quantify the degree of emphasis on words associated with amusement in viewer comments. Sanketh Shetty

Hmm, sounds like something right out of the list of candidates for the Ig Nobel prize…

YouTube’s “let it snow” Easter Egg

If you enjoyed the ‘let it snow’ Easter Egg in Google search, you should probably check out a similar effect on YouTube videos: some have an extra, snowflake-shaped button in the action bar – for the Flash player at least. When you click it, snow starts falling from the top, amassing over time – even after hitting ‘replay’ – at the bottom edge. The virtual snow reacts to your mouse movements, by trying to avoid the cursor, and continues to fall even if you pause the video. As far as I can tell, this Easter Egg appears on recently uploaded videos, like the one linked below.

Thumbnails in YouTube’s progress bar

When playing back videos on YouTube, you are probably familiar with the small tooltip that shows up while hovering over the progress bar to help you jump to a specific time in the video. It looks like the tooltip is enhanced with a thumbnail of the corresponding video frame, to give a preview of the section you will be taken to. The new feature is available with the Flash-based player and only on some videos; it’s hard to say how there were chosen, but the thumbnail generation is probably an ongoing process that will be rolled out to all videos in the future.

Update: And here is the official announcement, a couple of months later.