WSJ uncovers YouTube stats

The Wall Street Journal has done some educated guesstimating and figures YouTube holds about 45 terabytes of video, and that visitors have spent about 9300 man-years watching said video content so far. That’s made up of about 6 million videos, with a growth of 20% each month.

If/when YouTube collapses under the strain of their multimillion dollar bandwidth bill, it’ll be interesting to see how the net reorganizes itself. Will disparate 2nd-tier sites/services fill the gap in the way they did after Napster was taken down? What will happen to viral advertising briefs in the industry?

Maybe enough of the public will have grown used to their regular video production habits to pay for their own sites and bandwidth, and the next generation of web video sharing will be through light portals with direct links to creators’ own domains. The Coral cache system may then help them in the way it currently helps dug/slashdotted sites.

Here are some more stats from TFA:

Johan Pouwelse, a Delft professor [...] reports that 70% of YouTube’s registered users are American and roughly half are under 20 years of age.

The most devoted uploader is Christy Leigh Stewart, a 21-year-old college student who lives near Modesto, Calif., and who has so far uploaded nearly 2,000 videos. Nearly all involve Korean pop music…