Design YouTube

In this chapter, you are asked to design YouTube. The solution to this question can be applied to other interview questions like designing a video sharing platform such as Netflix and Hulu. Figure 1 shows the YouTube homepage.

YouTube looks simple: content creators upload videos and viewers click play. Is it really that simple? Not really. There are lots of complex technologies underneath the simplicity. Let us look at some impressive statistics, demographics, and fun facts of YouTube in 2020 [1] [2].

• Total number of monthly active users: 2 billion.

• Number of videos watched per day: 5 billion.

• 73% of US adults use YouTube.

• 50 million creators on YouTube

• YouTube’s Ad revenue was $15.1 billion for the full year 2019, up 36% from 2018.

• YouTube is responsible for 37% of all mobile internet traffic.

• YouTube is available in 80 different languages.

Step 1 - Understand the problem and establish design scope

As revealed in Figure 1, besides watching a video, you can do a lot more on YouTube. For example, comment, share, or like a video, save a video to playlists, subscribe to a channel, etc. It is impossible to design everything within a 45- or 60-minute interview. Thus, it is important to ask questions to narrow down the scope.

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