500 hours of YouTube

Over 500 hours of new content are uploaded to YouTube every minute.That's 30,000 hours of content uploaded every hour; 720,000 hours of new content per day!Numbers this large are nearly incomprehensible without context. How does one make sense of—let alone even watch—this much content? Which also led us to wonder: what else can you do in 500 hours?

First, before we see what else you can do with this much time, let's break these numbers down a bit further.

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Content uploaded vs. Content consumed

According to YouTube, over 5 billion videos are watched each day.

The average length of a YouTube video is 4 minutes, 20 seconds. When you do the math, that comes to 361,000,000 hours of content consumed each day.

Put another way, that's 39 seconds of YouTube content watched by each and every one of the 7.7 Billion people in the world, every single day.

This also means that every minute, while 500 hours of content are uploaded, another 250,000 hours are watched.

It's my Job to watch YouTube

Let's say it were your job to watch YouTube videos. Pretty fun job—sign me up!

How long would it take to watch the videos uploaded today? Assuming a 40-hour work week, just one day's worth of content would take you 360 years to get through!

Or, if you were to watch 24/7/365,it would take you 30,000 days, or just over 82 years to get through all the content uploaded in one day.

Clearly, the task is a daunting one and would take a lot of dedication.What else could you do in all that time?

Watch Every NFL Game ever played

The next best thing to watching YouTube is watching football (or Netflix).

The average time it takes to watch an NFL Game is 3 hours and 9 minutes. In 500 hours, you can watch 158 NFL Games from start to finish, including all the timeouts and commercials.

Including the regular season and playoffs, there are 267 games each year. A full season of football would therefore take approximately 841 hours to watch. This means the equivalent of a full season of football is uploaded to YouTube every 1 minute and 41 seconds.

Let's take this all the way. How long would it take to watch every NFL game ever played? As of June 2019, a little over 16,000 total games have been played in NFL history, across both regular and post season play. (I'm including AFL games, before the AFL and NFL merged).

This means that it would take 50,400 hours to watch every NFL game ever played. That's the equivalent to the content uploaded to YouTube every 1 hour and 40 minutes.

Take a Trip to Mars

One last comparison: You're hitching a ride with Elon to Mars. How many days' worth of uploads do you need to keep yourself entertained on the ride?

Most estimates are that it would take about 220 days to get to Mars. This means if you watched 16 hours of video a day (it's a hard trip and you need your 8 hours of sleep, none of that 24/7 nonsense), you would need to bring 3,520 hours of content. That is equivalent to the content uploaded to YouTube every 7 minutes.

So, if you've booked your trip to Mars, bring extra batteries.