YouTube, according to a blog post by its CEO and co-founder, Chad Hurley, serves up one billion video viewings daily.
And you thought your business had a lot of YouTube traffic!
To keep in mind the rapid growth of YouTube, it took only three years and two months for YouTube to grow a literal order of magnitude. This article from TechCrunch in July 2006 showed an impressive 100m videos served daily.
Now, to put that 1 billion number in perspective, the current ratings for the top 20 network primetime series – calculated weekly, not daily, total a mere 298,013,000 viewers. (Though, to be fair, those shows tend to last 44 minutes, not a maximum of 10 minutes.)
Now, you know about the effect of YouTube traffic on enterprise network performance; and the importance of making sure YouTube traffic does not interfere with the mission critical applications. Network performance monitoring, of course, is essential.
But YouTube’s growth isn’t just a bandwidth issue – it is a great cultural change which heralds as big an impact – if not bigger – than the rise of mass media in the 1930s.
First, there’s the creation aspect – anyone can create a video and put it online. There are no guarantees for distribution like there are with mass media, but neither are there barriers to entry to the market. I myself created a number of short documentaries, and placed them on YouTube. Some of them reached 100,000 views. Had I gone the film-festival route, far fewer people – on the order of hundreds, rather than thousands, would have seen the videos.
But more than that is the idea that viewers are willing to accept that entertainment does not need to be centralized – or displayed on the TV. The average length of a video on YouTube is 2 minutes, 46.1 seconds. I don’t have the percentage of videos watched in the U.S. compared to the world, but the U.S. uploads 34.5% of the videos – which is probably a good estimate of consumption as well, barring a better metric.
So let’s work out the math… 2768333333 minutes of videos daily, 34.5% of which is viewed in the U.S., meaning 955075000 minutes of video daily in the U.S., divided by a U.S. population of 304,059,724… that comes out to 3 minutes, 8 seconds of YouTube watching – or a little more than a video a day, for each American.
This is not a problem that will go away – this is a cultural shift that will only get bigger with time. Ignoring it will lead to disaster, especially considering that the baby boomers who grew up on TV are leaving the workforce, and the Millennials who grew up on the Internet are entering it. Managing YouTube traffic requires a proactive approach to traffic monitoring and policymaking.
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