Aubrium Blog
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YouTube by the numbers — revenue, reach, and the claims you cannot check
Alphabet reports over $60 billion in annual revenue. Pew finds 84% of US adults use it. YouTube claims 540,000 jobs. Here is what the filings actually say.
You are a cold item: what Instagram's own documents say about a new post
Everyone repeats that Instagram tests a new post on 500 people. That number is in no Meta document we could find. The 500 Meta does publish counts posts, not people.
X by the numbers: what the platform will say, and what it will not
The first audited user count in four years arrived in a rocket company's IPO filing. Here is what changed, what we can verify, and what still has no source.
Where a clip travels furthest: Shorts vs Reels vs TikTok
The same 30-second clip meets three different engines. One ignores your follower count, one ranks by it, and one publishes almost nothing. A comparison built only from what the platforms themselves publish.
What you cannot do when you don't post from the app
Publishing through Instagram's API is not penalized. It is limited. Shopping tags, story stickers, most of the music library and mid-flight collaborator changes do not work. Here is the documented list, taken off Meta's own pages.
What actually travels
The largest study of its kind found false stories spread faster, farther and deeper than true ones. Not because of bots. Because people respond to novelty and emotion.
The watermark penalty: recycling your TikToks to Reels
Instagram has said three times, in public, that it will not recommend reels carrying a visible watermark. TikTok's version sits in a developer page almost nobody reads. Neither platform will tell you how big the penalty is.
Watch-time optimization rewired what gets made
When platforms started ranking by retention, content changed. The two-second hook. The split-screen sludge. The ban on slow starts. This is how one ranking signal reshaped the grammar of short video, and what the research says it cost.
Watch time is not one number — the system cards define it eight ways
Adam Mosseri calls watch time a top-three ranking signal. Meta's own system cards define it at least eight different ways, across three surfaces, with no published weights. The metric everyone optimizes for is not a single metric.
