YouTube is big, and it's well known that nobody likes it more than Canada.
As it turns out, it's big in the same way the universe is big: it's unfathomable.
I read a Time Magazine article about YouTube, and the lead floored me: "For every minute that passes in real time, 60 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube."
Can that really be a sustainable pace? It must be if the year before we uploaded just 48 hours of video per minute.
They unroll that figure further to point out that means 10 years of video are uploaded each day. In a month, all YouTube users consume about 340,000 years of video combined. That's roughly 340,000 more years than recorded human history. My trusty calculator says that's just over four million years per year. So in a year, it's like we watch every minute of history from this point all the way back to when Lucy was around and still have time to check out what was happening for another million years prior.
The numbers put forth are mind-boggling, especially considering most individual uploaders are not making any money of off what they post. Sure there are channels on the video-search engine that one can subscribe to, but the vast majority of what people watch, cats and babies, is just amateur video of nothing of any particular importance. People keep watching anyway.
Television networks are always looking for ways to make the shows they air cheaper. They made a big move away from serialized shows toward reality-based ones. The next step is just airing mindless amateur video. It's like America's Funniest Home Videos without Bob Saget on the payroll, and no prize money to dish out. It's just Charlie Bit My Finger and cat-breading for an hour after the news.
Something called the Nyan Cat went viral last April and has since been viewed nearly 63 million times and spawned spinoffs like the Smooth Jazz Cover and multiple "extended editions." A 100-hour long version of the video has been viewed 3.8 million times. I really hope YouTube counts only page views and not how many times the video was played in its entirety.
One hundred hours of a simple GIF image that was "borrowed" and a Japanese song, which I assume is copyrighted, would be a great way for a major network to use up a block of time. They could run the video straight through the week between commercials and people can tune in until they just need to tell their parents they love them. Or they can run it as 100 hour-long episodes each week for two years.
YouTube, I always thought, was a bit of an enigma. I think it's great. It's a great place for information. Think of the difference in coverage of Tahrir Square a year ago, from a 24-hour news service to just some Egyptian guy who was there with his cellphone. He can post unedited, raw video of what was happening, and that's an important resource for all of us.
I also think it's great that things like Nyan Cat are up there. I laughed at it for about a minute before shutting it off and spending the next 10 minutes trying to forget what I saw.
The mystery is, in fact, people. If you don't agree, go watch the Nyan Cat like 63 million people before you, and explain how that became a thing.
