YouTube has turned eight, Monday, and has shared some interesting facts about the video service to mark this big day.
The most popular video sharing website in the world has revealed that users upload 100 hours of video every minute. Do the math and that will be 6,000 hours per hour and a staggering 144,000 hours every day. It also repeated a fact it shared back in March that it has a billion unique users per month. Facebook recorded the same achievement in October 2012, also about eight years after its birth. Twitter, founded in 2006, has around 200 million users a month.
"And so, this Monday, on our eighth birthday, we'd like to thank you for making YouTube the special place that it is. For showing us how video can create connections, transcend borders and make a difference. For clicking these links even if you aren't sure what they'll be, but you trust us. In short, thanks for making us better in big ways and small ones, too. We can't wait to see what you come up with next," YouTube said on its blog.
The numbers are quite overwhelming. To give everyone a perspective on the growth of YouTube, in 2011, users were uploading about 48 hours of video a minute. By 2012, this figure jumped to 72 hours each minute.
The "Gangnam Style" video Korean pop star Psy is the most viewed video of all time, now with 1.6 billion views and more than 7.55 million likes. The follow-up video of the K-pop phenomenon called "Gentleman" also broke records, collecting more than 38 million views on a single day.
Below are eight more amazing facts about YouTube:
- More than 1 billion unique users visit YouTube each month
- Over 4 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube
- 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute
- 70% of YouTube traffic comes from outside the US
- YouTube is localized in 53 countries and across 61 languages
- In 2011, YouTube had more than 1 trillion views or around 140 views for every person on Earth
- More than a million advertisers using Google ad platforms, the majority of which are small businesses
- 25% of global YouTube views come from mobile devices
YouTube was established in February 2005 and officially launched in May of the same year. The company was acquired by Google in the last quarter of 2006 for $1.65 billion.
