YouTube Stats: Is The Service Not As Big For Music As Previously Thought?
Although the music industry has for some time operated under the assumption that music related content made up 40% of YouTube videos, news and drastically different data from Pexeso, offers some very different numbers, suggesting some of the low payout related anger targeted at YoutTube may be misplaced.
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Guest post by Bobby Owsinski of Music 3.0
The music industry has always operated under the premise that music content made up about 40% of YouTube’s traffic, a figure that has bothered everyone considering how little revenue it’s generated as a result. No comes data from Pexeso showing that figure may be way off.
The company found that music-related content on YouTube amount to just 4.3% of the the service’s total traffic. In contrast, gaming-related content accounts for 33.4% of the total, entertainment-focused content has an 18.9% chunk, and bloggers, and YouTube personalities have a 14.3% of the pie. .
What’s more, YouTube itself says that music is only worth 2.5% of its traffic and users spend only an hour a month watching music videos!
That said, there’s a lot of new YouTube data that’s both interesting and a little scary as well.
- YouTube receives roughly 300,000 individual video uploads each day, amounting to 80k hours of video and 24TB of data.
- 8am PST is the busiest time of day for video uploads, whereas 12:36am is the least busy. Approximately 10x more videos are uploaded during the busiest time comparing to the least busy.
- The average video uploaded to YouTube is 15 minutes long and 86MB in size.
- 93.5% of videos uploaded to YouTube are in English.
- The People & Blogs category receives the highest volume of uploads, accounting for a whopping 41% of videos uploaded everyday, followed by Gaming (14%), Film & Action (10%) and Entertainment (8%).
- Although the People & Blogs category accounts for the most video uploads each day, Gaming is king, receiving the most attention.
- Static videos — typically spammy videos containing just a static image whose purpose is to lure people outside of YouTube — account for unbelievable 7.5% of all uploaded videos.
What happens to videos after they’re uploaded? That’s even more interesting.
- Only 35% of all videos uploaded will be claimed by rights holders. 26% will be monitored or monetized by the copyright holder; the remainder will be taken down.
- A whopping 32% of all videos will end up removed within the first 24 hours.
- 5% of videos will be deleted by users.
- 18% will be removed because the user had their account terminated.
- 9% will be taken down due to copyright infringement.
- 0.4% of all videos are made private by the users in the first 24 hours.
- 5% accounts that uploads videos in any given day get terminated for violating YouTube’s TOS.
- Terminated accounts upload around 20% of all videos every day, 6x more than a typical account.
I’m still a little leery of this data because of the big disparity from what we’ve used in the past. Although it’s enough to change my mind, I’m still looking for confirmation from another source just to be sure that music isn’t a big part of YouTube anymore.
Just wanted to point out a limitation in this study. Uploads and traffic are two very different things, particularly on YouTube. Think about 1000 wedding video upload that get a total of 30,000 plays vs. 1 Kayne clip that gets played 700,000 times.