For an April Fools gag, YouTube RickRoll'D their user base, sending all the homepage's promoted video clicks straight to that heinous Rick Astley "Never Gonna Give You Up" video. While I appreciated the joke, the information that it contained was a bit more interesting.

As far as I can tell, the video has been on the home page for about 24 hours now, give or take a few hours. In that time, it's racked up over 5.9 million views, almost 41 thousand comments, and 17 thousand ratings.

I'd assume a non-trivial portion of this traffic is from referrer links and multiple page views. That said, it gives you a rough snapshot of the upper limit on the typical volume of visitors and active (logged-in, commenting or rating) users that visit the YouTube homepage on a Tuesday.

Back in August 2006, YouTube had announced that over 100 million videos were watched per day. This figure is probably higher now, but it puts the homepage count into perspective, suggesting that perhaps 95% of YouTube's video views are from deep links to the site and offsite, embedded views.