YouTube Processed 2.5 Billion Content ID Copyright Claims in 2025

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YouTube's Content ID system processed a record 2.5 billion copyright claims in 2025, a 14% increase compared to a year before. While disputes remain rare, uploaders who challenged claims come out as the winner more often than not. Despite the increase in claims, the number of Content ID eligible rightsholders dropped.

To protect rightsholders, YouTube regularly removes, disables, or demonetizes videos that contain allegedly infringing content.

For years, little was known about the scope of these copyright actions, but that changed in late 2021 when the streaming platform published its first-ever copyright transparency report.

This report and the subsequent updates have shown that roughly 99% of all copyright claims on YouTube are handled through the Content ID system. Since most claims are automated, without any human intervention, access to this powerful removal tool is restricted to a few thousand formally approved rightsholders.

2.5 Billion Claims

YouTube’s latest Transparency Report shows that the number of automated claims continues to rise. In 2025, the platform processed 2,502,941,368 Content ID claims, up 14% from 2.2 billion the year before.

Of the approved 7,626 rightsholders who currently have access to the system, 4,454 actively used it. These numbers are both slightly down from last year. YouTube doesn’t provide a specific reason, but notes that access can be revoked as part of regular evaluations.

“To keep the ecosystem safe, we regularly evaluate partners’ access to CID to ensure they demonstrate an ongoing need for scaled rights management. In some cases, these evaluations may result in removing a partner’s access to Content ID and matching them with a more appropriate copyright management tool,” the transparency report reads.

As clearly shown above, the number of rightsholders participating in the Content ID system pales in comparison to the 295,531 rightsholders who filed removal requests through the standard webform, or the 173,338 that used the automated Copyright Match Tool.

Nonetheless, Content ID’s 4,454 active rightsholders were responsible for 99.48% of all copyright actions on the video streaming platform. Compared to earlier years, the automated Content ID takedowns continues to increase, both relatively in percentages and in absolute numbers.

Takedown actions per tool

Millions of Disputed Claims

As with any takedown tool, uploaders and third-party rightsholders are not always in agreement. In fact, there are millions of Content ID disputes every year.

YouTube reports that of all Content ID claims, uploaders have disputed 12,840,608, or 0.51% of the total. That’s a relatively small percentage but still a rather large absolute number. For comparison, uploaders appealed 9.9% of all webform removals, which translates to little over 267,000 counter-notices.

In 2024, uploaders won 70% of disputes. In 2025 that figure dropped slightly to 67.42%. However, those who decided to challenge the rejection though YouTube’s process, won their appeal 75% of the time.

The flow chart on the right illustrates the full appeals process.

Not all disputes are resolved though YouTube’s internal Content ID process. If uploaders persist that their content was erroneously claimed, while rightsholders argue the opposite, YouTube will reinstate the video, at which point rightsholders have to take the matter to court.

In 2025, 10,698 claims reached this stage, but fewer than 1% of these resulted in a lawsuit, YouTube notes.

Outside the Content ID system, YouTube also flags abuse of its DMCA takedown webform as a problem. In 2025, more than 6% of all these removal requests were believed to be “a likely false assertion of copyright ownership” by YouTube’s review team.

“The attempted abuse rate through the webform was more than 10 times higher than the attempted abuse rate across all other copyright removal tools,” the transparency report notes.

A $12 Billion Revenue Machine

While YouTube’s Content ID can be a significant source of frustration for uploaders, it has become a substantial revenue stream for rightsholders. Instead of removing infringing content, rightsholders chose to monetize over 90% of all Content ID claims in 2025.

YouTube reports that cumulative ad revenue paid to rightsholders through Content ID has now exceeded $12 billion since the system launched. That figure includes data up to December 2024 and will likely be billions higher today.

It is clear that not being present on YouTube at all is no longer an economically wise decision. On the contrary, for some rightsholders a viral infringing upload is no longer a problem, but a revenue opportunity intstead.