Estimate the total number of newly uploaded videos on YouTube.

Hey everyone, so continuing the series of #30daysofproduct, this is the second article. In this I would be solving an estimation question, let’s get started for this one ⚡

Youtube Img (Google Images)

The approach I’m gonna use here is, first ask some clarifying questions and then state what is youtube and its background, form the equation for calculation, calculate it, and if needed will do the sanity check.

So, starting with clarifying questions, here are my few questions to the interviewer -

1. Should I consider videos from all over the world or any specific country? (You choose — All over the world)
2. When you say “Newly uploaded” videos, do you mean the recent videos that are uploaded in the past 1 week or 1 month or 1 year? (You choose — 1 Year).
3. Youtube had multiple products like Youtube TV, Youtube for Kids, Youtube Music, Youtube Movies do you want me to consider all or specifically Youtube? (You choose — Specifically youtube).
4. Should I consider Shorts, private listed, live streams too? (You choose — Consider all youtube videos).

Now, our problem statement is more clear and we can proceed further.

Also, what I understand from Youtube is — Youtube is a platform where creators create video content and post that on the platform in order to earn money and grow their reach & audience, on other hand, there are viewers who consume different kinds of content and engage with them either by liking, commenting or supporting the video.

The equation I use here to calculate the number of videos is -

Total No. of videos uploaded in last one month = # of videos uploaded by power users + # of videos uploaded by hobbyists + # of videos uploaded by occasional users.

I’ve categorized all users under three categories which we’ll discuss further below. Now to complete the calculation, we need to find the above values, so that we can put them in the equation and find the answer.

1. Considering, the world had a total population of 8B, but out of which youtube is banned in a few countries, among them one of the biggest countries is China with a population of 1.5B, we’ll subtract that value + 0.5B considering other countries as well. Doing the math, it comes out to be 8-(1.5 + 0.5) = 6B
2. Now, out of the 6B population, assuming 60% of the population had access to the internet -6*0.6 = 3.6B. After this, another assumption is that out of those 3.6B, only 90% of the population had youtube installed on their phones and are currently using it, which comes to be -3.6*9 = 3.2B. (I’m rounding off the value to the nearest whole number for making calculations easy).
3. The above number we got consists of creators + consumers. But we had to calculate only for the creators. Assuming 10% of the total population are creators and 90% as consumers, so doing the maths here -3.2*0.1 = 0.32B = 320M people.
4. As discussed above we’ve categorized the creators into three different categories i.e. Power users, Hobbyists, and Occasional users. Now the motive of dividing users is, as everyone doesn’t upload a video at the same pace, few uploads dozens in a month, whereas few 1 in a year, so to consider every use case, I’ve divided it this way.
5. Power users are the ones who have a large following or production houses, who upload an approx of 4 videos in a month (48 in a year).
   Hobbyists are the ones who casually upload any video just for fun or a hobby, considering an approx of 1 video in a month (12 in a year).
   Talking about occasional one, we can assume they’ve uploaded 1 video in 6 months (2 in a year)
6. Now doing the calculation here -

Total number of videos

In this, I’ve considered 10% of the total users as Power, 40% as hobbyists, and 50% as Occasional users. The final amount that comes out is 3300M videos or 3.3B videos in a year.

Let’s do the sanity check, to make sure whether our range is fine or not, to do the same, what I’ll do is divide the total number of videos by the total number of creators and that comes out to be = 3300/320M =~ 10 videos per year, which is approx 1 video per month per user, which seems to be fair considering all of them are creators. Thus we can wrap up our answer and discuss the summary with the interviewer.

Thanks for reading and staying it here, till the end, if you like it do HIT 50 CLAPS. You can always send me a Hi, here at LinkedIn or at my portfolio.