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YouTube users are now uploading 35 hours of video per minute, or 2,100 hours of video uploaded each hour and more than 50,000 hours every day.
YouTube, whose massive network of servers was sucking in 24 hours of video per minute last March, likes to frame its user stats in analogies. The comparison it uses to characterize the 35-hour-per-minute mark is impressive:
“If three of the major U.S. networks were broadcasting 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year for the last 60 years, they still wouldn’t have broadcast as much content as is uploaded to YouTube every 30 days,” said Hunter Walk, YouTube’s director of product management.
What’s fueling the increase in hours? This chart notes that users have doubled the number of uploads to YouTube in the last two years.
That’s not all that’s contributing to the time climb. YouTube also increased the time cap on videos uploaded from 10 to 15 minutes, and boosted the upload file size over the last few years to 2GB.
And that’s all from the desktop. Newfangled smartphones such as the Motorola Droid X and HTC Evo 4G sport large, 4.3-inch screens that are optimized for video playback.
YouTube said 75 percent of 16,000 YouTube Mobile users surveyed report that mobile is their primary way of accessing YouTube content.
Some 70 percent of those users visit YouTube Mobile at least once a day, while 58 percent spend more than 20 minutes per visit at YouTube Mobile.
Walk also challenged users to upload 48 hours of video every minute. Given the 11-hour upload bump road from March, it’s not improbable that YouTube won’t see 48 hours of video uploads a minute in 2011.
YouTube’s parent, Google, is the master at helping users find content, and it looks like those qualities are trickling down to YouTube.
The unit is experimenting with YouTube Topics on Search, which picks topics on YouTube and associates videos with them, using popular uploader keywords, common search queries, playlist names and Wikipedia articles.
In the company’s example, when a user searches for “Obama,” YouTube will suggest other related topics tied to videos, such as “michelle obama” or “john mccain.”
Users who click to get to videos on these topics will find videos that contain both topics by clicking on the (+) next to the topic.