YouTube is the most popular online streaming platform in the world. Every day, millions of videos are being uploaded on the platform, and billions worldwide watch those videos.
The platform began in 2005 and was later acquired by Google. Currently, the platform has over 2.1 billion active users as per Statista, much more than other online streaming platforms like Netflix and others. The platform also commands a second position in the number of overall visitors after Google.
YouTube has a big audience base in India with over 467 million users, with the United States a close second with 246 million users.
Are you wondering how many videos are there on YouTube?
The platform’s popularity can be gauged from the fact that every minute, about 500 hours of videos are uploaded on the platform. This means that every hour, about 30,000 hours of videos are being uploaded on the platform.
To further hook the audience, YouTube launched Shorts, a short-format video content to complement the traditional long-form videos.
YouTube also experimented with the revenue-sharing model for short-form content creators. In May 2021, YouTube launched a $100 million Shorts fund as an appetiser to lure new creators to the platform. In September 2022, YouTube switched from a fixed fee to a 45% revenue-sharing model for Short creators.
However, in February 2023, YouTube updated its monetisation policy and introduced three modules for all forms of content creators.
In this article, we will explain the total number of YouTube videos on the platform.
Total number of videos on YouTube

As explained earlier, people upload 500 hours of YouTube videos every minute. This eventually translates to 30,000 hours of YouTube videos every hour and 720,000 hours of videos every day.
It is a huge number. Let us convert the hours to the number of likely videos on YouTube uploaded per day. For this, let us take an average YouTube video of 5-6 minutes. This means that, on average, about 2.2 billion videos are uploaded on the platform every year.
This is a generalisation as YouTube also removes many videos due to policy violations. As per the Google Transparency Report, YouTube has removed over 14 million channels and 7.3 million YouTube videos between April and June 2023. That’s just three months. Multiply this by four, and you will get about 28 million videos removed yearly.
As far as the data on the total number of YouTube videos is concerned, there is no definitive answer, as many videos are also removed regularly. But it is fair to say that the number of videos on YouTube could be in the billions.
Also read: YouTube symbols and icons explained