Speaking specifically about YouTube, Rasty Turek of PEX declares, “Not all content is equal,” and then sets out to prove it.

Some facts:

• YouTube is the most popular and largest video platform
• YouTube hosts over 5 billion videos and over 1 billion hours of content
• Over 10 hours of content is uploaded to YouTube every second

Some things you might not know about YouTube, according to PEX’s insights:

• “The length of videos is increasing, driven mostly by long form content, primarily gaming videos and live streaming.”
• Annual uploads may top out at 1.5 billion in 2020
• The number of users uploading may top out at 110 million in 2020

This is where it gets interesting.

According to PEX, it seems only the Gaming category is gaining share, and all other categories are on a downward trend:

As to views, only 1 in 156 videos gets more than 100,000 views.

Further, that 0.64% of videos generates 81.6% of all views!

To put it another way, 99.36% of all videos get less than 18.4% of total views, which is less than 100,000 views each. Ouch!

To conclude, Rasty states:

“Music is the only category that consistently attracts hundreds of millions of users to watch the same videos over and over. The first video that ever broke 1B view mark was a music video. The vast majority of videos with over 1B views are music videos.”

Not surprisingly, the most subscribed to channel on YouTube is Hindi music channel T-Series, with over 105 million subscribers.

My take: Who knew? But I wonder if there’s more to this. Fifteen years ago, the revenues of the music, film and video game industries were tied. Now, gaming pulls in more than the other two combined. Hence, the only growing category on YouTube. Could it be that gamers are just listening to YouTube music playlists in the background as they while away the time?