YouTube celebrated its sixth birthday this month by announcing it has surpassed over 48 hours of video uploaded to the video-sharing Website every minute.
That’s a 37 percent bump from last November, when YouTube averaged 35 hours of video uploaded per minute. More impressively, that’s a 100 percent hike from 2009, when YouTube said it exceeded 24 hours of video uploaded each minute of the day.
The video upload count is staggering enough, but YouTube also said it has passed 3 billion daily video views, up 50 percent from a year ago, when the site said it was raking in more than 2 billion views a day.
For perspective, YouTube said that’s the equivalent of nearly half the world’s population watching a YouTube video each day, or every U.S. resident watching at least nine videos a day.
That viewership is happening across more than 350 million devices, from computers to smartphones and tablets. Video consumption, not 48 hours of video uploaded each day, is YouTube’s key metric.
YouTube launched six years ago in May as purely a user-generated video platform, but for the last four years Google has aimed to advertise against those videos. Without people watching the content en masse, the advertising efforts don’t get rewarded.
YouTube is undergoing another major transformation. With Google TV as its main platform, YouTube is attempting to transition to users’ living rooms to gobble some of the five hours of TV U.S. consumers are watching each day.
If this effort, buoyed by the new YouTube Movies service, live streaming and other efforts to attract viewership, succeeds, Google could easily possess the world’s largest display-ad platform via users’ home entertainment systems.
This would position Google better to compete with display-ad giant Facebook, which continues to attract eyeballs and accrue major time spent online.