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Digital Ethnography, a great blog by a group of Ethnography students at Kansas State University, has one of those posts that you always want to hand: YouTube Statistics.

I had a feeling that I was a bit out of date with the 100,000 video uploads a day stat that was still my default reference, and it turns out I’m out by 50,000. With a little Google tinkering they estimate that there are currently about 78 million videos available on YouTube.

Now if that’s not a stat that helps you spell out the superabundance of content online, I don’t know what is…

The guys at Digital Ethnography have also taken a sample (230 odd) of YouTube and analysed them for things like topic (music and entertainment rule with about 20% each, but “how to” is an intriguingly large minority category with 2.8%) and language (Dutch is 3rd after English and Spanish!).

: : Now it’s always dangerous when I try to maths, but if Digital Ethnography’s estimates were right that would mean that there are currently 2.2 million “how to” videos on YouTube, 4 million-ish about cars and 1.7 million about pets…

: : : Bonus links: Digital Ethnography keeps a Wiki page on YouTube stats, which is worth a bookmark for sure… and if you’re *really* interested in YouTube stats then this post on Waxy.org and the debate in the comments are well worth a read.

Anyhow, a YouTube post wouldn’t be compete without a gratuitous video celebrating the diversity and delights that only a superabundance of online content can bring a fellow. So here’s Richard Pryor on Sesame Street doing the ABC – no really…