YouTube Video Uploads Hit 60 Hours Per Minute

Google’s YouTube video sharing Website continues to grow in popularity with users uploading 60 hours of video every minute, or one hour of video each second.

That’s marked growth from 2007, when YouTube saw six 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.

Rapid Growth

Moreover, YouTube users are triggering four billion video views each day, or 28 billion views a week, which is up from three billion views a day in May 2011. For perspective,YouTube counted more than a 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.

Advertising Sales

Google desperately wants to monetise those video views more fully. Google executives have said only three billion YouTube videos a week generate money from display ads. The company’s display ad business is generating $5 billion (£3.2bn) revenue a year, compared with $2.5 billion (£1.6bn) in mobile ads and over $20 billion (£12.8bn) in search ads.

YouTube has not hidden 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.