Study shows YouTube plays increasingly large role in German economy

Photo: Courtesy dpa

YouTube contributed more than €1.2 billion ($1.2 billion) to Germany’s gross domestic product in 2021, according to a study by Oxford Economics released in Berlin on Wednesday.

The British consulting firm found that YouTube left a visible footprint on the job market, providing over 30,000 full-time jobs in Germany.

YouTube, which was set up in the United States 17 years ago and is currently owned by Google, claims a global monthly log-in figure of more than 2 billion users, with more than a billion hours of video watched every day.

YouTube has been active in Germany for the past 15 years. The daily live viewing time more than tripled in Germany between January 2020 and December 2021, the head of YouTube Germany Andreas Briese said. The average German adult watched 40 minutes of YouTube every day.

Viewing is increasingly via a large screen in the living room, rather than on a smartphone or computer, with 30 million people in Germany watching YouTube on their televisions in December last year.

Subscriber figures reflect the platform’s reach. “In Germany, more than 5,000 channels have more than 100,000 subscribers,” Briese said, representing a rise of 20% on the year. Likewise, over 400 German channels have more than a million subscribers, a rise of 15%.

The study’s findings were based off of three anonymous surveys of 3,000 YouTube users in Germany, 670 YouTube content creators and 500 businesses. Survey results took account of information from YouTube personalities as well as revenue figures from the music sector, but not from YouTube’s business itself.

 

 

Courtesy © dpa Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH www.dpa.com