500 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute

Data Never Sleeps v8

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Data collection, analysis, and visualisation site DOMO recently compiled and released version 8 of their “Data Never Sleeps” analysis and visualisation of Internet data.

From the data analysis visualisation, just to pick out five random examples, we can see that for every minute of every day:

• 500 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube.

• Spotify adds 28 new tracks to its library.

• Amazon ships 6,659 packages.

• WhatsApp users share 41,666,667 messages.

• Facebook users upload 147,000 photographs.

After doing a few tests I have worked out that one hour of 720p 25fps/5Mbps compressed video consistently consumes 750MB after being uploaded to YouTube. I did my tests using three different compression types, including H.264.

Now, we can see from the visualisation that 500 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute. That would work out to 30,000 of uploaded video every hour—just multiplying by 60 minutes to the hour.

Data from Oberlo Web site [Image Links]

Hence, if one hour of average video consumes 750MB after being uploaded, then 30,000 hours is going to require 22,500,000MB of storage space on YouTube’s servers. Or, when converted to terabytes, that is 22.5TB.

Based on this, every hour of every day of the year, 22.5TB of new video content is uploaded to YouTube!

In 2020 the largest reliable storage hard disk is 12TB. These would be the disks that YouTube is most likely using. So, they are going to need to add about two of these to their storage array every hour.

Over the course of a single day the server engineers at YouTube are going to need to plug in an additional 48 x 12TB drives, and that doesn’t allow for backup which they would have to have.

This is just uploads to YouTube

Imagine the amount of data being stored when you add in Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, ViewBug, Gurushots, Pintrest, TikTok, etc, etc!!

I also found that it costs US$6,350,000,000 per year to run and maintain YouTube. I suspect a lot of this money goes into purchasing disk space, floor space/buildings to house the servers, and power for the servers, network, and cooling.

Makes you wonder how much the power being consumed for all this storage contributes to the greenhouse gases and climate change.