Videos
In January 2012, it was estimated that visitors to YouTube spent an average of 15 minutes a day on the site, in contrast to the four or five hours a day spent by a typical US citizen watching television.[110] In 2017, viewers on average watched YouTube on mobile devices for more than an hour every day.[111]
In December 2012, two billion views were removed from the view counts of Universal and Sony music videos on YouTube, prompting a claim by The Daily Dot that the views had been deleted due to a violation of the site's terms of service, which ban the use of automated processes to inflate view counts. That was disputed by Billboard, which said that the two billion views had been moved to Vevo, since the videos were no longer active on YouTube.[112][113] On August 5, 2015, YouTube patched the formerly notorious behavior which caused a video's view count to freeze at "301" (later "301+") until the actual count was verified to prevent view count fraud.[114] YouTube view counts once again updated in real time.[115] Since September 2019, subscriber counts are abbreviated. Only three leading digits of channels' subscriber counts are indicated publicly, compromising the function of third-party real-time indicators such as that of Social Blade. Exact counts remain available to channel operators inside YouTube Studio.[116]
On November 11, 2021, after testing out this change in March of the same year, YouTube announced it would start hiding dislike counts on videos, making them invisible to viewers. The company stated the decision was in response to experiments which confirmed that smaller YouTube creators were more likely to be targeted in dislike brigading and harassment. Creators will still be able to see the number of likes and dislikes in the YouTube Studio dashboard tool, according to YouTube.[117][118][119]
YouTube has an estimated 14.8 billion videos with about 4% of those never having a view.[10] Just over 85% have fewer than 1,000 views.[120]