Why YouTube’s best weapon is its library

Five hundred hours of content are added to YouTube every minute.

Olivia Heller

The streaming wars often feel like an arms race.

In 2021, Disney+, Netflix, and Amazon spent a combined $55B to enrich their content libraries, which estimates peg at:

  • 4.5k hours for Disney+
  • 40k hours for Netflix
  • 50k hours for Amazon

But YouTube…

… which is considered an alt-streaming competitor, blows them all out of the water.

  • Every three hours, YouTube adds as much content as Netflix and Amazon’s entire catalogs combined, or 20x Disney+’s.

With truly something for everybody, a recent poll found 95% of teens use the app.

Like YouTube, TikTok has also proven a formidable streaming competitor. Watch time on TikTok in 2021 was 22.6T minutes, compared to Netflix’s 9.6T.

The main difference: TikTok didn’t spend billions making that content — its users made it, for free.

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