YouTube statistics 2026: how many videos, users and views, with dates and sources
How many videos are on YouTube, how many users it has, and what it earns, with the date and source beside every figure. Who estimated what, how, and which popular numbers we left out.
- 01YouTube publishes no total video count. The published estimates are 9.88 billion public videos (University of Massachusetts Amherst researchers, sampled October to December 2022), 13.325 billion (TubeStats, reported 6 January 2024) and 29 billion (Omdia, December 2025).
- 02YouTube gives no current user total either. Its press page says 'billions of monthly logged-in users'. Google's ad tools showed a potential ad reach of 2.54 billion in July 2025, and DataReportal warns that this is not a user count.
- 03YouTube ads earned Alphabet $40.4 billion in 2025 and $11.1 billion in the second quarter of 2026. Shorts averages over 200 billion views a day, and YouTube says it paid over $100 billion to creators, artists and media companies over four years.
YouTube does not publish how many videos it hosts, and it does not publish a current count of its users. The published estimates of the video count run from 9.88 billion public videos, in a university sample taken in late 2022, to 29 billion, in an Omdia estimate for December 2025. For users, YouTube's press page says only 'billions of monthly logged-in users'. The most recent specific figure it gave is over 2 billion logged-in viewers a month who watch music videos, on 23 October 2025.
This page collects the YouTube numbers that have a date and a source we could open. Where YouTube or Alphabet said a number, we name the post or filing and the date. Where a researcher or analyst estimated it, we say who, how and when. Where we did the sum ourselves, the text says 'our arithmetic'. We left out numbers we could not trace. Every source was checked on 15 October 2026.
One question behind these numbers has a page of its own. The ranking of channels by subscribers is on our page about the most subscribed YouTube channels, and it uses the same dated approach.
How many videos are on YouTube?
Nobody outside YouTube knows exactly, and YouTube has not said. We found no video total on YouTube's press page, in its CEO letters of 2023, 2024 and 2026, or in Alphabet's quarterly results and 2025 annual report. Every figure below is an outside estimate. Each rests on a different method and a different date, which is why they differ so much.
| Estimate | Measured | Videos | Method and caveats |
|---|---|---|---|
| University of Massachusetts Amherst and Pushshift.io researchers (McGrady and others) | 5 October to 13 December 2022 | 9,881,141,822 public videos | Random guessing of 11-character video IDs. They found 10,016 videos and scaled the hit rate up to every possible ID. Published in 2023 in the Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media. |
| TubeStats (Ethan Zuckerman and Jason Baumgartner) | Reported by TidBITS on 6 January 2024 | 13.325 billion videos | The same random-guess approach, run on an ongoing basis. TidBITS also reports about 4 billion videos posted in 2023. |
| Omdia, a research firm | December 2025, reported by IBC on 30 January 2026 | 29 billion videos | Omdia's own estimate. IBC's report does not describe the method. Omdia expects the count to pass 30 billion in early 2026. |
The sampling method deserves a sentence, because it is the only open one. A YouTube video ID has 11 characters, which gives about 18.4 quintillion possible IDs. Almost every guess misses. The paper calculates that guessing by hand, at three seconds a guess, would take about 178 years to find a single video. The researchers instead used a quirk in YouTube's search that checks 32,768 IDs in one query, and they counted how often a guess hit a real, public video. The hit rate, scaled up to every possible ID, gives the estimate.
Do not chain the three figures into a growth rate. They come from different methods, and the first two count public videos that the method can find. Omdia also says Shorts are now over 90% of new uploads, so the mix of what gets uploaded has changed since the 2022 sample.
YouTube's own press page gives a flow rather than a stock. It says that, on average, over 20 million videos are uploaded to YouTube daily. The page is undated, and we read it on 15 October 2026. If that held for a full year it would come to about 7.3 billion uploads (our arithmetic). TubeStats counted about 4 billion public videos posted in 2023. The two figures do not have to agree: one is undated, and the other counts only what the sampling method can see.
How views are spread across videos
A random sample shows what a typical video looks like. The University of Massachusetts Amherst sample of 10,016 videos, taken in late 2022, had a median of 35 views. Of the videos in it, 4.88% had no views at all, 65.44% had fewer than 100 views and 86.93% had fewer than 1,000.
Only 3.67% of the sample had 10,000 views or more, and those videos held 93.61% of all the views in the sample. The paper adds that the 16 most viewed videos in the sample, 0.16% of it, together had more views (50.52%) than the rest of the sample combined.
Omdia describes a similar split for viewing time in 2025, as reported by IBC on 30 January 2026. Omdia's analysts say the top 1% of videos generate 91% of total viewing time and the other 99% share the remaining 9%. Omdia also puts music videos at 33% of all viewing time, news at 10% and video podcasts at 5%, and says YouTube holds the equivalent of 280,000 years of video. The two studies measure different things, views in 2022 and viewing time in 2025, so the numbers should not be merged.
How many users does YouTube have?
Pages that answer this question mix three different kinds of number: viewers that YouTube counts, audiences that advertisers can reach, and answers to surveys. They answer different questions, so we take them in turn.
What YouTube says
YouTube's press page describes 'billions of monthly logged-in users' and gives no figure. The specific numbers it has given are narrower. In May 2019 CEO Susan Wojcicki told advertisers that more than 2 billion logged-in viewers use YouTube every month, as TechRadar reported on 3 May 2019. On 23 October 2025 YouTube said over 2 billion logged-in viewers watch music videos each month. In June 2025 CEO Neal Mohan said one billion viewers watch podcasts on YouTube every month.
A logged-in count leaves out people who watch without signing in, so each of these figures is a floor for the audience and not a total.
Ad reach is not a user count
DataReportal, written by the analyst firm Kepios, publishes the figure that most pages call 'users'. It comes from Google's ad planning tools, and it shows how many people YouTube ads could reach. That was 2.53 billion in January 2025 (page updated 12 March 2025) and 2.54 billion in July 2025. DataReportal says plainly that ad reach is not a direct proxy for monthly active users. It may include duplicate and non-human accounts, and the tools publish data for only 88 countries and territories, which DataReportal says hold roughly 80% of internet users outside China. It adds that platforms' reach figures tend to run lower than the user totals the same companies publish.
The same January 2025 report lists the ten territories with the most YouTube ad reach. Together they come to about 1.44 billion, or 57% of the 2.53 billion global figure (our arithmetic).
| Country | YouTube ad reach, January 2025 |
|---|---|
| India | 491 million |
| United States | 253 million |
| Brazil | 144 million |
| Indonesia | 143 million |
| Mexico | 83.6 million |
| Japan | 78.7 million |
| Germany | 65.5 million |
| Vietnam | 62.3 million |
| Philippines | 57.7 million |
| Turkey | 57.5 million |
What national surveys find
Surveys ask people, so they answer a different question from either count above. A Pew Research Center survey of 5,022 US adults, fielded from 5 February to 18 June 2025, found that 84% say they ever use YouTube. A separate Pew survey of 5,123 adults, fielded from 24 February to 2 March 2025, found that about half visit YouTube at least once a day and that 33% visit several times a day. Pew published both on 20 November 2025.
In the UK, Ofcom's Online Nation report of 10 December 2025 says YouTube is used by 94% of adults. Time on YouTube is rising and averages 51 minutes a day, not including the TV set.
Watch time and TV viewing
YouTube counts watch time because it judged that time spent says more about enjoyment than views do. In a post dated 27 February 2017, Cristos Goodrow, YouTube's VP of Engineering, said people were watching a billion hours of YouTube every day, a milestone reached the year before. We found no later daily total for all screens. The figure YouTube repeats now is for TVs only.
Viewers watch over one billion hours of YouTube on TVs every day. YouTube said so in its CEO letter of 6 February 2024, in Neal Mohan's Cannes Lions talk on 18 June 2025 and in a Partner Program post on 10 August 2026. The Cannes post adds that, for more than half of the top 100 most watched channels in the world, TV is the most watched screen. The 2024 letter says the number of top creators who got most of their watch time on the big screen rose by more than 400% in three years. Because the wording has stayed the same since 2024, it tells you little about growth.
Live video is a large share. In the Made on YouTube post of 16 September 2025, YouTube said that on average over 30% of daily logged-in viewers watched live content in the second quarter of 2025.
In the US, Nielsen's The Gauge for July 2026 put YouTube at a record 14.2% of all television viewing. That was up 6% on June and 5.0 share points ahead of the next media distributor. Nielsen published it on 10 September 2026. YouTube's press page also says YouTube has been number one in streaming watch time in the US for nearly three years, citing Nielsen as of January 2026.
Shorts daily views
YouTube reports Shorts as average daily views. It has given the figure on five dates that we could find, and each is in a post we opened.
| Date | Daily Shorts views | Where YouTube said it |
|---|---|---|
| 1 March 2023 | Over 50 billion | Letter from Neal: Our 2023 Priorities |
| 6 February 2024 | Over 70 billion | Letter from the YouTube CEO: 4 Big bets for 2024 |
| 18 June 2025 | Over 200 billion | Neal Mohan at Cannes Lions 2025 |
| 21 January 2026 | 200 billion, as an average | From the CEO: What's coming to YouTube in 2026 |
| 10 August 2026 | Over 200 billion | Partner Program update post |
From over 70 billion to over 200 billion is a rise of about 2.9 times in about 16 months, from 6 February 2024 to 18 June 2025 (our arithmetic). Since June 2025 YouTube has used the same 200 billion wording, so we cannot tell whether the average has grown since. The 2024 letter also says the number of channels uploading Shorts grew 50% year over year. Shorts can now run up to three minutes, and the dates for that change are on our page about how long YouTube Shorts can be.
YouTube ad revenue by quarter
Alphabet reports a line called YouTube ads in each set of quarterly results and in its annual report. It leaves out YouTube subscriptions, which sit in a different line. The figures below are in US dollars, from Exhibit 99.1 of each Alphabet earnings release, with the same quarter of the year before alongside.
| Quarter | Released | YouTube ads revenue | Year earlier | Change (our arithmetic) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Q1 2025 | 24 April 2025 | $8,927 million | $8,090 million | +10.3% |
| Q2 2025 | 23 July 2025 | $9,796 million | $8,663 million | +13.1% |
| Q3 2025 | 29 October 2025 | $10,261 million | $8,921 million | +15.0% |
| Q4 2025 | 4 February 2026 | $11,383 million | $10,473 million | +8.7% |
| Q1 2026 | 29 April 2026 | $9,883 million | $8,927 million | +10.7% |
| Q2 2026 | 22 July 2026 | $11,055 million | $9,796 million | +12.9% |
Alphabet rounds its own growth rates. Its headline bullets give 9% for the fourth quarter of 2025, 11% for the first quarter of 2026 and 13% for the second quarter of 2026. For the first three quarters of 2025 the bullets say only that YouTube ads grew at a double-digit rate. The percentages in the table come from the dollar figures and are rounded to one decimal place.
For full years, Alphabet's 2025 annual report (Form 10-K) shows YouTube ads revenue of $31.5 billion in 2023, $36.1 billion in 2024 and $40.4 billion in 2025. That is growth of 14.7% in 2024 and 11.7% in 2025 (our arithmetic). The report says the $4.2 billion rise from 2024 to 2025 was driven by direct response advertising products, followed by brand advertising products.
Subscriptions are not in that line. On 4 February 2026 Alphabet said YouTube's annual revenue across ads and subscriptions exceeded $60 billion for 2025. Taking the $40.4 billion of ads from $60 billion leaves more than $19.6 billion for subscriptions and anything else outside the ads line (our arithmetic, and a floor, because Alphabet gives no split).
These are revenues to Alphabet, before the share that goes to creators. What a creator earns per view is a different calculation, and our page on how much YouTube pays per view works through it.
To turn a view count into a range for your own channel, the Earnings Calculator shows its arithmetic, and the Shorts Monetization Calculator covers the Shorts route.
Subscriptions: Music, Premium and YouTube TV
| Date | Figure | Where it was said |
|---|---|---|
| 6 February 2024 | Over 100 million YouTube Music and Premium subscribers, including trials | CEO letter, 4 Big bets for 2024 |
| 6 February 2024 | More than 8 million YouTube TV subscribers | The same letter |
| 6 March 2025 | Over 125 million Music and Premium subscribers, including trials | Google blog post, A new milestone for YouTube Music and Premium |
| 23 October 2025 | Over 125 million Music and Premium subscribers, including trials | YouTube blog post on the $8 billion music payout |
The words 'including trials' matter. The count includes people on a free trial, so it is not the number of people paying. We found no later, higher figure than 125 million in the posts we read.
Alphabet reports paid subscriptions for Google One and YouTube together. It said it had surpassed 270 million in the first quarter of 2025 (24 April 2025), had over 300 million in the third quarter (29 October 2025) and over 325 million in the fourth (4 February 2026), and reached 350 million in the first quarter of 2026 (29 April 2026). These totals include Google One, so they are not a YouTube subscriber count.
Creators and payouts
YouTube describes payouts in multi-year totals, so there is no single yearly figure. In February 2024 it said it had paid over $70 billion to creators, artists and media companies over the last three years. In September 2025, and again in its January 2026 CEO letter, it said over $100 billion over the last four years. As simple averages those are about $23 billion and $25 billion a year (our arithmetic). The windows overlap and differ in length, so do not subtract one from the other to get a yearly rate.
The payouts go to creators, artists and media companies, so they are not creator ad earnings alone. On 23 October 2025 YouTube said it paid out over $8 billion to the music industry in the 12 months from July 2024 to June 2025.
The Partner Program is how most of that money reaches creators. In February 2024 YouTube said more than 3 million channels were in it. On 10 August 2026 it said over 3 million creators were in it. The wording changed from channels to creators and both say over 3 million, so the two cannot show growth. The requirements for joining are covered in our guide to making a YouTube channel.
Two more figures come from the CEO letter of 21 January 2026. YouTube said over 500,000 creators were in YouTube Shopping, and that in 2024 its ecosystem contributed $55 billion to US GDP and supported more than 490,000 full-time jobs. The letter does not name a study for the GDP and jobs figure, so treat it as YouTube's own claim.
Captions, dubbing and languages
These figures matter if you work with transcripts. On 1 March 2023 YouTube said it had captioned over 6 billion videos and that more than 1 billion users watched with captions on every day. In June 2025 it said that, in the six months since creators began using auto dubbing, it had dubbed more than 20 million videos using AI. In its January 2026 letter it said that in December 2025 YouTube averaged more than 6 million daily viewers who watched at least 10 minutes of autodubbed content.
YouTube's press page adds that localised versions of YouTube run in over 100 countries across 80 languages.
Captions are the reason a transcript is possible: YouTube already holds the text. Not every video has a track, though, and our page on videos with no captions covers what to do when there is none.
To pull the text out of a video yourself, the Transcript Downloader saves a timestamped transcript as TXT or SRT, and the Subtitle Downloader saves the caption file itself as SRT or VTT.
Numbers we left out
Several figures appear on pages that rank for these searches, and we left them out because we could not trace them. Some pages say YouTube receives over 500 hours of video every minute. Others say it has 2.7 billion monthly active users, or 800 million or 4.3 billion videos. We found none of these on YouTube's press page, in its CEO letters or in an Alphabet filing. The 800 million and 4.3 billion video counts also sit far from all three estimates in the table above. If one of them has a primary source, the date on that source is what decides whether it is still true.
We also left out any number that we could read only in a summary. We could not open The Atlantic's piece on the video count, so it is not cited here. We read the University of Massachusetts Amherst paper itself in the Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media, and we read Omdia's figures through IBC's report.
How we checked, and how to check one video
YouTube figures were read on the post or page itself on 15 October 2026. Alphabet figures were read from Exhibit 99.1 of each earnings release and from the 2025 annual report, both filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Where a post gave a date, the date is in the text. Alphabet's next results will replace the last row of the revenue table, so that is the first section on this page to go out of date.
Everything above describes the whole platform. For one video, the YouTube Metadata Viewer shows its public details in one view, including its counts, and the Engagement Rate Calculator sets likes and comments against views.
To see when a channel could reach its next milestone, the Subscriber Growth Calculator projects dates for 1K, 10K, 100K and 1M from your last 30 days of growth.
Questions people ask
How many videos are on YouTube?
YouTube does not publish a total. The published estimates are 9,881,141,822 public videos (University of Massachusetts Amherst researchers, sampled October to December 2022), 13.325 billion (TubeStats, reported 6 January 2024) and 29 billion (Omdia, December 2025). They use different methods and dates, so they should not be compared as a trend.
How many users does YouTube have?
YouTube does not give a current total. Its press page says 'billions of monthly logged-in users'. It said over 2 billion logged-in viewers watch music videos each month on 23 October 2025. Google's ad tools showed a potential ad reach of 2.54 billion in July 2025, but DataReportal says that is not a count of users.
How many videos are uploaded to YouTube every day?
YouTube's press page says that, on average, over 20 million videos are uploaded daily. The page is undated, and we read it on 15 October 2026. That is about 13,900 videos a minute (our arithmetic). We found no YouTube source for the often repeated figure of 500 hours of video a minute.
How many views do YouTube Shorts get a day?
YouTube says Shorts averages over 200 billion daily views. It first gave that figure on 18 June 2025, in Neal Mohan's Cannes Lions talk, and repeated it on 21 January 2026 and 10 August 2026. The earlier figures were over 50 billion on 1 March 2023 and over 70 billion on 6 February 2024.
How much money does YouTube make?
Alphabet reported YouTube ads revenue of $40,367 million for 2025 in its annual report, up from $36,147 million for 2024. In the second quarter of 2026 it was $11,055 million. On 4 February 2026 Alphabet also said YouTube's revenue across ads and subscriptions exceeded $60 billion for 2025.
How many people pay for YouTube Premium or Music?
YouTube said on 6 March 2025 that YouTube Music and Premium had over 125 million subscribers, including trials, and repeated the figure on 23 October 2025. Trials are counted, so it is not the number of paying subscribers. Alphabet's own totals of 350 million paid subscriptions (29 April 2026) also include Google One.
How many YouTube videos get no views?
In the University of Massachusetts Amherst random sample of 10,016 videos, taken in late 2022, 4.88% had no views and the median was 35 views. 86.93% had fewer than 1,000 views. It is a sample of public videos from 2022 and does not describe the platform today.
Which country has the most YouTube users?
India has the largest YouTube ad reach, at 491 million in January 2025, followed by the United States at 253 million, according to DataReportal. Those are ad reach figures from Google's planning tools, not counts of unique users.
How much has YouTube paid creators?
YouTube said in September 2025 and again on 21 January 2026 that it had paid over $100 billion to creators, artists and media companies over the last four years. That includes artists and media companies as well as creators, and it is a total over four years, not a yearly figure.
How much of US television is YouTube?
Nielsen's The Gauge for July 2026, published on 10 September 2026, put YouTube at a record 14.2% of US television viewing. That was 5.0 share points ahead of the next media distributor.
Why do other sites show different YouTube numbers?
Some quote old figures without a date. Some use ad reach as if it were a user count. Some repeat estimates that no YouTube, Alphabet or published study source supports. A number is only as good as the date and the source next to it, and this page gives both for every figure.
Which of these figures goes out of date first?
The quarterly YouTube ads revenue. Alphabet reports it four times a year, and each release adds a row. YouTube's own posts repeat figures such as 200 billion Shorts views for months before they change.
Sources
- YouTube for Press. YouTube by the numbers. blog.youtube· Checked 15 October 2026.
- YouTube Official Blog. From the CEO: What's coming to YouTube in 2026 (21 January 2026). blog.youtube· Checked 15 October 2026.
- YouTube Official Blog. Neal Mohan at Cannes Lions 2025 (18 June 2025). blog.youtube· Checked 15 October 2026.
- YouTube Official Blog. The next 20: Powering the future of entertainment together at Made on YouTube (16 September 2025). blog.youtube· Checked 15 October 2026.
- YouTube Official Blog. Letter from the YouTube CEO: 4 Big bets for 2024 (6 February 2024). blog.youtube· Checked 15 October 2026.
- YouTube Official Blog. Letter from Neal: Our 2023 Priorities (1 March 2023). blog.youtube· Checked 15 October 2026.
- YouTube Official Blog. New opportunities to earn and changes to the YouTube Partner Program (10 August 2026). blog.youtube· Checked 15 October 2026.
- YouTube Official Blog. $8 billion: YouTube's twin engine continues to fuel the future of music (23 October 2025). blog.youtube· Checked 15 October 2026.
- YouTube Official Blog. You know what's cool? A billion hours (27 February 2017). blog.youtube· Checked 15 October 2026.
- Google. A new milestone for YouTube Music and Premium (6 March 2025). blog.google· Checked 15 October 2026.
- Alphabet. Alphabet Announces First Quarter 2025 Results, Exhibit 99.1 (24 April 2025). sec.gov· Checked 15 October 2026.
- Alphabet. Alphabet Announces Second Quarter 2025 Results, Exhibit 99.1 (23 July 2025). sec.gov· Checked 15 October 2026.
- Alphabet. Alphabet Announces Third Quarter 2025 Results, Exhibit 99.1 (29 October 2025). sec.gov· Checked 15 October 2026.
- Alphabet. Alphabet Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2025 Results, Exhibit 99.1 (4 February 2026). sec.gov· Checked 15 October 2026.
- Alphabet. Alphabet Announces First Quarter 2026 Results, Exhibit 99.1 (29 April 2026). sec.gov· Checked 15 October 2026.
- Alphabet. Alphabet Announces Second Quarter 2026 Results, Exhibit 99.1 (22 July 2026). sec.gov· Checked 15 October 2026.
- Alphabet. Annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended 31 December 2025. sec.gov· Checked 15 October 2026.
- McGrady, Zheng, Curran, Baumgartner and Zuckerman. Dialing for Videos: A Random Sample of YouTube. Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media, 2023. journalqd.org· Checked 15 October 2026.
- TidBITS. How Big Is YouTube? (6 January 2024). tidbits.com· Checked 15 October 2026.
- IBC. YouTube set to pass 30 billion videos in early 2026 (30 January 2026). ibc.org· Checked 15 October 2026.
- DataReportal. YouTube Users, Stats, Data & Trends (page update 12 March 2025). datareportal.com· Checked 15 October 2026.
- DataReportal. Digital 2025 July Global Statshot Report. datareportal.com· Checked 15 October 2026.
- Pew Research Center. Americans' Social Media Use 2025 (20 November 2025). pewresearch.org· Checked 15 October 2026.
- Ofcom. From apps to AI search: how the UK goes online in 2025 (10 December 2025). ofcom.org.uk· Checked 15 October 2026.
- Nielsen. YouTube captures a record 14.2% of TV in July 2026, The Gauge (10 September 2026). nielsen.com· Checked 15 October 2026.
- TechRadar. Over 2 billion YouTube users are logged in and watching every month (3 May 2019). techradar.com· Checked 15 October 2026.
Written by Faisal Ashfaq. Faisal Ashfaq maintains the YouTubeScribe caption extractor at Deeporax AI LTD in Oldham. He writes the under-the-hood notes on timed text.
Reviewed on 15 October 2026. If a line is wrong, email support@youtubescribe.com.