The extremely popular video sharing site YouTube doesn’t make a point of revealing its size, user activity, or demographics. But Lee Gomes of the Wall Street Journal pieced together much of that information by “scraping” YouTube for data. Here are the main stats uncovered:
-YouTube hosts over six million videos, growing at about 20 percent every month.
-The videos take up 45 terabytes of storage — about 5,000 home computers’ worth.
-The total time spent watching YouTube videos since it started last year is 9,305 years!
-The content requires several million dollars’ worth of bandwidth a month to transmit.
-The most popular items get an especially large percentage of the traffic.
-The words “dance,” “love,” “music” and “girl” are all exceedingly popular in video titles.
The size and cost of running this free service makes many wonder what the future holds for YouTube. Some predict it will collapse under the expense of the sheer volume of transmitted data. Still others think Microsoft, Yahoo, or some other big boy will come and play (read: buy out). But even with a buy out, the concept needs to make money eventually… How?
That’s the million dollar question not so easily answered with the typical social networking trend of “advertising revenue.”
