YouTube Statistics

Counted exactly. Channel totals — how many channels we track, their combined subscribers and views, and the 18.4M videos in the database — are exact counts, recomputed nightly. They grow as we add channels, so the figure you see is always the current tracked set of 18,596 channels.

Estimated from a sample. Shape-of-the-data figures — view, like and duration distributions — come from a random sample of 50,000 videos drawn each night, rather than from scanning all 18.4M rows. A sample that size pins a percentage to within a few tenths of a point, because precision follows the number of videos sampled, not what fraction of the table they are. Where a figure is scaled up from the sample to stand for the whole table (about 368×), it is marked with a leading ≈. Anything without that mark was counted, not estimated.

Averages, not fixed totals. Because the tracked set grows, per-channel averages (average views per channel, average channel age, median earnings) are the stable figures — a total that jumps the day we add a thousand channels is describing our coverage, not YouTube. Where a total is shown, read it as “across everything we track”.

Coverage. TubeStats tracks 18,596 channels, weighted heavily towards large ones. These figures describe that set, not all of YouTube, and the true YouTube-wide numbers are larger by an unknown factor — we don't publish a guess at it.