Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's true, but its framing sort of rests on an assumption of fungibility that doesn't really hold. There are many important cultural works whose copyright status is currently the main bottleneck to their being made widely available to the public. Part of why this happens is that, in any medium, most works aren't very popular. A few years ago, someone who worked at YouTube told me that more than half of YouTube vide…
I find the no views on half of youtube videos to be difficult to accept unless counting non-public. If we filtered for a 5 seconds + perhaps that would fix that. I would if youtube would prune anything without a view in the future.
This kind of selection bias pops up in a lot of contexts. When you ride the bus, for example, you're disproportionately more likely to be on a bus that's over half full than on a bus that's mostly empty. And most of your friends probably have more friends than you do. (Not just you. I'm not saying you're unfriendly or asocial. It's true for most people.)
The guy I was talking to, on the other hand, could just run a database query over all the videos, and he did.
It's possible that YouTube has pruned those zero-views videos since I talked to him.