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Man estimates how long it would take to watch everything on YouTube

Home> Technology> News

Published 12:06 19 Nov 2023 GMT

Man estimates how long it would take to watch everything on YouTube

It's like asking if it was ever possible to have ever read every book ever printed

Kit Roberts

Kit Roberts

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Featured Image Credit: STR/NurPhoto/Nikos Pekiaridis/NurPhoto/Getty Images

Topics: News, World News, YouTube

Kit Roberts
Kit Roberts

Kit joined UNILAD in 2023 as a community journalist. They have previously worked for StokeonTrentLive, the Daily Mirror, and the Daily Star.

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We might spend increasing amounts of our time on social media, but now one person has estimated just how long it would take to watch all of YouTube.

Now, this is of course assuming that you only watch the content which is already on YouTube.

Given that 2,500 videos are uploaded onto YouTube every minute, let's just remove that as a factor as it would render it completely impossible.

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In fact, just to keep up with YouTube in real-time, taking the same average video length of 11.7 minutes, you'd need around 29,250 people watching simultaneously.

So, if we took a snapshot of YouTube as it is now and nothing more was added onto it, how long would it take to get through everything on there?

Website wyzowl did the math for how long it would take.

It took the assumption that there are around 800 million videos on the site, then the same average video length of around 11.7 minutes.

The result?

Would it be possible to watch every video on YouTube?
Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Just to watch that much content would take approximately 9.36 billion minutes to watch.

That's 156 million hours, 6.5 million days, or a whopping 17,810 years of just watching YouTube videos.

Even if you had 100 screens going at the same time in some nightmarish Clockwork Orange setup, it would still take 178 years to get through it all.

Basically, it's absolutely impossible.

A similar experiment was carried out by rare book seller and TikToker Tom Ayling on his TikTok channel, who explored if it was ever possible for someone to have read every book printed in English.

He set some ground rules, that the reader would read a book a week from the age of 10 to 50, and would start reading in the year 1500.

You couldn't even keep up with the people uploading new videos.
izusek / Getty

The first book was printed in English in 1473, so first they'd have to get caught up, reading the 294 books printed in English up until 1500, called 'incunabula'.

They'd finish those in five years and 34 weeks, and would then have to catch up with the books printed while they were reading.

They would do this by 1506, with there being few enough books printed up to 1507.

The TikToker worked out that reading one book a week, the reader would then be able to keep up with the presses all the way until 1530. This means that the end of 1529 is when someone could truthfully claim to have read every book printed in English.

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