youtube views

Numberphile visits YouTube to learn why view counts on new videos used to freeze at 301. It explains that YouTube holds counts while it verifies views aren't from bots or fakes.

Musician TheFatRat describes how his video with 47 million views was claimed by another party through YouTube's copyright system and how he got it back.

The Game Theorists analyze how PewDiePie rose to become the most subscribed channel on YouTube. The video looks at why let's plays and gaming channels thrive on the platform.

A PyCon 2012 talk by early YouTube engineer Mike Solomon on how YouTube scaled its architecture, which is mostly Python.

Writer and artist James Bridle shows how strange and disturbing children's videos on YouTube, from surprise eggs to algorithmic mashups, are produced for ad revenue. He argues they reveal problems in a data-driven internet.

A short comedic complaint by ProZD about YouTube search failing to surface his own video even when searching its exact title. It illustrates how poor search results have become.

Tom Scott's long explainer on YouTube's copyright system, Content ID and the DMCA. He argues the platform's system is a workaround for a broader copyright system that does not fit the modern world.

Tom Nicholas critiques Veritasium's sponsored video on driverless cars, using it to examine YouTube sponsorships, science-channel credibility and how statistics and misinformation can be used in branded content.

Part 1 of Smarter Every Day's three-part series on manipulating the YouTube algorithm. It features Renee DiResta and examples of how social media platforms can be manipulated.

The Original Ace shows how creators can use a third-party music distributor to file Content ID claims on their own videos, turning false-claim abuse into a share of ad revenue. It also names distribution companies and their revenue splits.

A guide to using YouTube's Content ID by claiming your own videos through a distributor, so the claims share revenue with the creator and monetize re-uploads. It credits another creator who pioneered the method.

Moishe Lettvin, a former Google engineer, shares lessons from 250 interviews and his time on the hiring committee. He tells how the committee given anonymized packets, including its own, would hire almost none of them.

Cuong Do of YouTube describes how a handful of engineers scaled the site, covering hardware, software and database scalability challenges during its rapid growth. The talk was given at the 2007 Seattle Conference on Scalability.

Coffee Break analyzes about 40,000 videos from seven months of YouTube's trending tab. It examines whether trending is biased toward mainstream media and late-night shows.

Folding Ideas examines weird, algorithm-gamed children's content on YouTube, from automated toddler videos and educational spam to exploitative prank channels. It looks at how autoplay and recommendation systems reward this material.

VICE's Oobah Butler spends eight months using fake reviews to push a nonexistent restaurant, The Shed at Dulwich, to number one on TripAdvisor in London. The short documentary shows how easily review systems can be gamed.

Veritasium's Derek Muller explains his hypothesis that YouTube's algorithm, not viewer preference, drives views, and that click-through rate has become the key metric. He argues this pushes creators toward clickable titles and thumbnails and leads to burnout.

Louis Rossmann lays out evidence that a Yelp salesperson had friends leave negative reviews of his repair shop after he declined advertising. He frames it as extortion and defamation.

Linus Tech Tips addresses criticism of its clickbait-style thumbnails in an Honest Answers episode, explaining that the YouTube algorithm pushes creators toward them.

Jon Gjengset's 2020 PhD dissertation presentation at MIT on partial state in dataflow-based materialized views, the idea behind the Noria database. The Q&A is cut out.

Tom Scott explains YouTube's 11-character video IDs, which are base-64 encoded 64-bit numbers, and whether YouTube could ever run out of them. It covers counting systems and base 64 briefly.

Linus Tech Tips breaks down the company's income streams, including sponsors, YouTube Premium, merch and other products. It gives percentages for each revenue source.

Chess YouTuber agadmator reports that YouTube took down his podcast with Hikaru Nakamura as harmful or dangerous content. It was later restored.

Music YouTuber Rick Beato describes confronting the people behind copyright blocks on one of his videos. The video is a rant about how takedowns and demonetization hit music education channels.

The first video ever uploaded to YouTube, in April 2005. Co-founder Jawed Karim stands in front of the elephants at the San Diego Zoo for about 19 seconds.

Highlight clip from the 2021 Free Expression Awards honoring YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki. The video became notable for its overwhelmingly negative like/dislike ratio.

A mashup that plays a Miles Davis improvisation video alongside an LCD Soundsystem clip with no editing, so the two seem to perform together. It also became known for an affectionate mouse cursor moving along.

Veritasium explains why clickbait titles and thumbnails work, how he tests them, and why educational creators feel pushed to use them. He classifies types of clickbait and discusses the trade-offs.

Tom Scott explains why confetti and snow wreck video quality, using interframe compression and bitrate. He demonstrates it live by changing the quality on screen.

A Jimquisition episode by Jim Sterling demonstrating the Copyright Deadlock, where a video includes footage owned by several companies so that competing YouTube Content ID claims cancel each other out. It highlights how absurd the system is.

Linus Tech Tips gives its 2020 breakdown of how the company earns money, including ads, sponsors, merch and affiliate links. It includes a pie chart of revenue sources.

Tom Scott's video whose title shows its own live view count, and the story of how he made that work. It explains why open APIs were once common and why they largely disappeared.

PSY's music video for Gangnam Style, the K-pop hit that became a global viral phenomenon.

The official music video for Despacito by Luis Fonsi featuring Daddy Yankee, a Latin pop hit that became the most viewed video in YouTube history.

A nearly four-hour video essay by hbomberguy on plagiarism on YouTube, centered on specific creators who copied other people's work. It examines what plagiarism is and how it went unaddressed.

The fail0verflow 27C3 talk on breaking PS3 security, covering how Sony's implementation failed, including its ECDSA mistakes.

Folding Ideas uses the rise and fall of the YouTube competitor VidMe to examine why platforms are not friends to creators. It argues that alternatives to big platforms tend to attract the users banned from the original and lack a core vision.

Joe Armstrong, creator of Erlang, interviews Alan Kay at Code Mesh. They discuss the meaning of object orientation, message passing, the META II paper, and the state of computer science.

A live mock programmer interview in which Casey Muratori interviews game developer Shawn McGrath using a less confrontational format devised by Chris Hecker. It gets deep into technical details while showing how the candidate actually thinks and works.

Kurzgesagt argues that Facebook's claimed 8 billion daily video views are inflated by freebooting, meaning re-uploads of creators' videos. It describes how this harms independent creators.