YouTube's ghost town of billions of unwatched, ignored videos

Probably just quickie uploads to show something to friends, directly from the device on which they were recorded, with only a handful of views from their Whatsapp (or whatever) contacts. I have quite a few of these. Unlisted, in my case, but probably most people don't bother with that, and anyway the random algorithm would find them regardless whether they're listed.

I'm actually glad the mega-profit advertising machine that is Youtube still allows this kind of thing. Videos for a small audience that will likely never make them any money.

The original article this refers to is here:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20250213-youtube-at-20-...

So what are the constraints on the YouTube 11 digit code generation?

I guess if I had a few thousand YouTube URLs I could analyse them.

I’m guessing it’s 11 digits from a limited character set

Estimated 15 billion YouTube videos and only 4% have 0 views. I guess the average video having less than 50 views could also count as 'unwatched'? 4% is less than I would have guessed.