YouTube reaches milestone: 100M subscribers, 2.5 billion viewers in 2024
Popular video platform YouTube has hosted everything from concert clips and podcasts to political ads, tutorials and much more in the last 20 years. It says that it now sees an average of some 20 million videos uploaded daily. YouTube has become the world’s largest digital video service in terms of time spent by viewers and ad revenue, according to eMarketer analyst Ross Benes.
Since the first clip debuted two decades ago, YouTube on Wednesday (April 23, 2025) celebrated more than 20 billion videos that have been uploaded to the platform. Over the next 20 years, the site expanded beyond what was imagined possible back in 2005. It was reportedly during a dinner party that PayPal colleagues Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim conceived YouTube in 2005. The domain YouTube.com launched on Valentine’s Day that year.
The platform reached more than 2.5 billion viewers globally last year, and hit 100 million subscribers to its music and premium tier, according to market tracker Statista. YouTube is projected to surpass all US cable television services in paid subscribers within two years, according to Benes. Users worldwide watch more than a billion hours of YouTube content daily on television sets alone, Google reported.
YouTube said it will upgrade its TV viewing experience this summer with improved features and “quality tweaks,” though it did not provide further details. Analyst Ross Benes said: “If you go back 20 years, it would have seemed laughable that this website with kids making parody videos would become a threat to Disney, ABC, and CBS.” He added: “That’s what they were able to accomplish.”
Analysts consider Google’s 2006 purchase of YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock a pivotal moment, combining Google’s search and advertising expertise with a video-sharing platform that had passionate users. Google used its advertising know-how to build a successful model, sharing revenue with creators who attracted significant audiences.
Meanwhile, YouTube adheres to a set of community guidelines. Videos that infringe on the platform’s rules and regulations were immediately taken down before they reached wide viewership. In a 2024 transparency report, 9.1 million videos, 4.8 million channels, and 1.3 billion comments were removed globally for various violations. Of these, about 80,000 were removed for violating misinformation policies.
In Feb. 2025, it was reported that more than 181,000 videos related to the Philippines were removed in the 3rd quarter of 2024 alone after being flagged for misinformation or hate speech, a local official of tech giant Google said.
Reference: YouTube says more than 20 billion videos uploaded in 20 years
