YouTube released a study Wednesday saying that the "creator economy" spurred by its massive video service supports the equivalent of 394,000 full-time jobs in the US and contributed $20.5 billion to the US gross domestic product last year. The study, conducted by independent advisory firm Oxford Economics, was commissioned and paid for by YouTube.
For context, the entire US workforce had 124 million actual full-time workers at the end of 2020, according to the US government's Bureau of Labor Statistics. The US total gross domestic product in 2020 was about $21 trillion, according to the US government's Bureau of Economic Analysis.
Google-owned YouTube, which has at least 2 billion monthly users, is the world's biggest online video operation.
The study also disclosed internal YouTube data that more than 38,000 US channels had at least 100,000 subscribers and that more than 5,000 channels had at least 1 million subscribers as of the end of last year.
