


dollars and thereby accounted for approximately 11.2 percent of Google’s total annual revenue. In 2021, YouTube generated global advertising revenues of more than 28.84 billion U.S. Sizing YouTube global viewership, it comes as no surprise that the popular video platform has become not only a springboard for influencers but also a powerful money-making tool for Google and its parent company Alphabet. Due to the video format growing popularity and versatility, YouTube is one of the most effective platforms for attracting large audience: as of January 2021, Korean children’s song “Baby Shark” is not only the most watched YouTube video of all time, but also the first video hosted on the platform to surpass 10 billion view. YouTube’s other main avenue is corporate media content such as official music videos, which can go viral within a matter of hours and reach 100 million views in less than two days, as was the case with BTS music video “Butter” in 2021. Swedish gamer PewDiePie, for example, has become a key YouTube figure and has amassed 110 million subscribers by September 2021. Having started as a platform for original content, YouTube launched a new creative class of content producers who draw huge audiences to the screen and have subsequently become celebrities themselves. In August 2021, more than 694 hours of video were streamed on YouTube every minute, reflecting the increased appetite for digital video content among internet users.

In the U.S., the streaming service is particularly popular with younger internet users who sometimes even access the platform several times a day to entertain themselves or follow up on the latest news. At the beginning of 2022, India counted the largest YouTube audience by far, followed by the United States with 240 million users on the popular video platform. The platform’s user base was composed of more men than women, with around 12 percent of YouTube total users being men aged between 25 and 34 years, and approximately nine percent being women aged 35 and 44 years. The leading websites that users visited thanks to a link on were, and, with more than 180 million visits and close to 55 million visits, respectively.Īs of 2021, there was an estimate of 2.24 billion YouTube users worldwide. Global users visited more YouTube pages when accessing the platform from their mobile devices, averaging 4,63 pages per session against the 2.84 pages visited by users on desktop devices. Between January 2020 and March 2021, users landing on YouTube have been increasingly visiting only one page before leaving the website, bringing the bounce rate to 52 percent in October 2020. As of the beginning of 2021, a large part of the traffic to was redirected through social media: Facebook's own link shim l. generated an average of 40 million monthly visits, while accounted for 26.6 million monthly visits.
