YouTube emerged as one of the biggest platforms for content creators ever since its 2005 launch. Various big names, right from pop-star Justin Bieber to internet sensation PewDiePie to future late night host Lilly Singh, all got their start on YouTube. YouTube singlehandedly killed off television channels like MTV by becoming the primary source of releasing and watching music videos. While YouTube made it easier to release content across genres, the website seems to be reaching a saturation point. According to the latest report by Music Business Worldwide, only 0.64 percent of all videos on YouTube are ever viewed more than 100,000 times. This new data is an analysis of YouTube’s content published by firm Pex which claims to be "the most advanced video & music analytics platform on the internet".

What Does the Data Mean?

According to the data published by Pex, the 0.64 percent of videos with 100,000 views or more on YouTube represents 81.6 percent of all views on the platform. This means that 99.36 percent of all videos uploaded to YouTube draw less than a fifth of all views. (The data used by Pex for this analysis is based on performance of all publicly available videos as of December 31, 2018.) According to the news article, Pex CEO Rasty Turek suggests that "should YouTube remove underperforming videos, they would save an astounding amount of money and still retain most of the revenue". To put this in contrast, in 2015 YouTube owner Alphabet/Google announced that more than 400 hours of video were uploaded onto the platform every single minute. That number has almost certainly climbed since then.

"Should YouTube remove 99.36% of all underperforming videos, they would save an outstanding amount of money and still retain most of the revenue" - Rasty Turek, Pex

According to Pex, it indexed 'exabytes of data' representing the 'entire catalogue of publicly available content on YouTube'. Speaking further Turek said, "Pex is a search engine, not dissimilar from Google. We index selected platforms, extract audio and video content, fingerprint it and search through it. In addition, we collect and update all surrounding metadata on a regular basis. We have no direct relationships with any of the platforms. We have no visibility into private and unlisted content, nor have we any information about the consumers of the content."

What Else Does the Data Reveal?

The vast majority of videos with over 1 billion views on YouTube are music videos. Music is the only category that consistently attracts hundreds of millions of users to watch the same video repeatedly. While gaming content is YouTube’s fastest growing category of video, music is the most profitable. Videos under the Music category are also the shortest in length and generate the most views per average video. The average number of views for videos in the Music category are 16,397, at an average length of 6.8 minutes, with an average 2,411 views per minute of video content. In second place is the Entertainment category, with 13,431 views per video, at an average length of 12.9 minutes, with 1,041 views per minute. Music content actually only accounts for 5% of all content on YouTube, but still makes up 20% of all views.