A year ago, YouTube celebrated its 10th anniversary by compiling its most successful audiovisual content in a commemorative video. As usual, this video went viral, it reached 16,391,365 views, 283,049 likes and 22,944 comments.
These numbers for a single content are clear evidence of YouTube’s capacity to impact audiences through its messages. The milestones and records that have been set and broken by the platform year after year have allowed it to become the third most visited site online.
Recently, it celebrated its 11th anniversary. To commemorate it, YouTube shared some statistics that would blow away any investor, industry worker, millennial or geek.
In terms of traffic:
- Approximately 1.3 billion people are YouTube users.
- Users upload 300 hours of video each minute.
- Users’ sessions average 40 minutes.
- Half of the views take place from mobile devices.
- The site offers content in 76 languages, reaching 95% of the Internet’s population.
In financial terms:
- YouTube’s annual profit for Google is USD $4.0 billion.
- YouTube generates 6% of Google’s advertisement profit.
- In the last three years, the company’s partners have increased their profits by 50% year after year.
- From 2007, YouTube has paid USD $1.2 billion to intellectual property rights holders.
- In November 2006, Google paid 1.6 billion for YouTube.
- The number of advertisers that engage in video advertising grew by 40%.
- The advertising expense of the platform’s Top 100 advertisers increased 60% year after year.
- The combined profit of the best-paid YouTubers was of USD $54 million in 2015.
- The functioning and maintenance costs of the platform in this decade amount to USD $6.3 billon.
These figures show the industry that the vision, constant innovation and determined bet on mobile platforms, as well as a good relationship with advertisers gives out this Internet’s titan.
The role of YouTube in history has been crucial; it has become humanity’s ‘audiovisual repository’ and it has transformed the way in which we interact with knowledge and society in general.