Users of Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) YouTube video sharing Website are uploading 60 hours of video every minute, or one hour of video each second.
That’s marked growth from 2007, when YouTube saw 6 hours of video a minute uploaded. This stat grew rapidly over the last five years, rising to 24 hours in early 2010, then 35 in November 2010 and 48 before growing 30 percent in the last eight months to hit the 60-hour-a-minute mark.
Moreover, YouTube users are triggering 4 billion video views each day, or 28 billion views a week, which is up from 3 billion views a day in May 2011.
For perspective,YouTube counted more than 1 trillion playbacks in 2011, or roughly 140 views for every person on Earth.
YouTube had fun with the stats, creating this new Website, onehourpersecond.com, which offers interactive cartoons of what happens in a YouTube second. For example, in 1.5 “YouTube seconds,” the International Space Station orbits Earth once.
YouTube hopes to grow the video consumption with its dozens of professional channels, which provide original content from partners such as Madonna, The Onion and Jay-Z.
The company is also banking on Google TV-the company’s Web TV initiative for marrying Web surfing with channel surfing on Internet TVs, Blu-ray players and streaming media servers-to bolster YouTube viewing.
Google is also live-streaming a lot of content. Today’s State of the Union address with President Barack Obama will be broadcast live on YouTube.
Google desperately wants to monetize those video views more fully. Google executives have said only 3 billion YouTube videos a week generate money from display ads.
Google’s display ad business is generating $5 billion in revenue a year, compared with $2.5 billion in mobile ads and over $20 billion in search ads.
YouTube hasn’t hid from the fact that it wants to boost user engagement, which will vastly increase the number of ads it serves and profit the video sharing unit makes from those ads.
To do this, the company needs to increase the amount of time users spend on the Website from an average of 15 minutes to a few hours.
Hence the professional content channels, streaming movie service and Google TV.