There’s a word that’s frequently omitted from the recent blog chatter about YouTube’s latest upload stats: mobile. It’s an important word, too, especially for a site that sees tens of thousands of uploads per day.
For those of you who aren’t up to date, a recent YouTube blog post claimed the iPhone 3GS has bumped uploads by 400% per day since its release last Friday. Taken out of context, that’s mind-blowing, and at first led me to believe iPhone 3GS users were somehow pushing nearly half a million videos per day through YouTube’s servers. That would be staggering.
In the original context, though, you can see the YouTube team is talking about mobile upload increases, not total upload percentages, which makes this completely unsurprising news. The last six months have seen the first widespread adoption of phones with video paired with data connections capable of uploading those videos. It’s no surprise then that the last six months have also seen a 1700% increase in mobile uploads and the 400% iPhone 3GS stat mentioned earlier. It’s pretty easy to post huge growth numbers from…next to nothing, and it just gets easier when Apple sells a million phones, all with build in video and editing features, all with an easy YouTube upload app.
Now it’s easy to panic and wonder when all of this uploading is going to crush AT&T’s upstream, but YouTube hasn’t released any hard numbers. It’s still 400 percent, which could be 100 or could be 10,000. Even a generous 100,000 videos a day is a lot for mobile video, but compared to the number of mobile users (take the 20 million active iPhone users, for instance) and you’re talking about marginal amounts of data compared to the total upstream per day.
So please, take it easy, and don’t forget to look at the original data before taking fantastical news to heart.
