Ref: https://ethanzuckerman.com/2023/12/22/how-big-is-youtube/
I don’t see a lot of talk about the “denominator problem”. This article does a great job at providing context to the discussion of normalizing data. It’s not too difficult to skew most datasets to fit our viewpoint. As a undergrad student, I had shared in this guilty pleasure too. And I would not be surprised if a similar practice exists in some of the industry. Not that it’s anybody’s fault, I belive it’s just part of our nature.
Anyways, I really appreciate Ethan sharing the process here. The linked articles about building URLs for YouTube can be valuable from engineering PoV. Thanks for Tubestats as well.
I believe that high level data like this should be published regularly for all large user-generated media platforms. These platforms are some of the most important parts of our digital public sphere, and we need far more information about what’s on them, who creates this content and who it reaches.