How many people around the world are using YouTube to watch videos? You can bet it’s quite a lot but the real figure is shockingly huge.

Based on the latest data from Statista there are 1.86 billion YouTube users around the world.

Whilst it is a whopping number of people tuning into the world’s favourite video website, it’s surprisingly not growing much year on year. Based on the numbers from Statista there were 1.78 billion global users in 2020 and 1.68 billion in 2019 suggesting that the majority of users signed up long ago when their uptake would have been at it’s quickest.

It has long been established as the number one source of video content online and such has dedicated users from years ago. This is unlike music streaming which is still fairly fresh to the market. Although music streaming services have come up in a similar timeline to YouTube their ubiquity is nowhere near the level of YouTube’s and there are still billions of potential listeners out there yet to move onto the new form of music consumption.

That’s why music streaming is still growing at such a fast rate. However, surpassing its levels of growth in the last year are podcasts. As music streaming services adopt podcasts in deeper ways, the audio content is growing rapidly whereas music streams themselves are growing less slowly, although still notably increasing each year.