Time Magazine provided a rather exhaustive review of YouTube’s past, present and future. Check out the full article, titled “The Beast With a Billion Eyes” (a title, no doubt, with Shakespearean roots). Some highlights:
This is the first ever coverage of YouTube that failed to mention Shaycarl or Olgakay.
The piece cites the age-old quote that every minute that passes in real time, 60 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube, and then plays with the math (more video uploaded in past month than three big TV networks in the past 60 years).
YouTube gets 4,000,000,000 page views a day, which adds up to 1,000,000,000,000 a year.
The author creates the mock YouTube video title, “LOLOLOLOL this thing is amazeballs!!!!!!!”
YouTube recently enlarged the thumbnail images very slightly. “That change alone increased clicks to the Watch page by 2%,” said Margaret Gould Stewart, director of user experience.
On the efforts to boost channels (versus individual videos): Where there used to be two units of organization on YouTube–a single video and the 1 billion video collection–now there’s something in between.
YouTube has 800,000,000 users (about the same as Facebook) who watch 3,000,000,000 hours of video a month. But even one of the most-subscribed guys, RayWilliamJohnson, has 5.3 million subscribers. So that could suggest that the number of users who actually subscribe is in the low single digits.
Average viewing session remains a low 15 minutes (compared to hours of television binging).