YouTube Sees 3 Billion Views per Day

How big is YouTube? It’s biiiiig – 3 billion views per day big. On this, YouTube’s sixth birthday, the Google-owned video sharing service released a few impressive stats (via infographic, of course), detailing its impressive numbers. Today, users upload more than 48 hours – yes, two days worth! – of videos every minute. This represents a 37% increase in the number of uploads over the last six months and a 100% increase over last year.

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To highlight how much video this represents, the Googlers at YouTube got creative (and a little silly):

What can happen in two days, you ask?

You could drive non-stop across the country from our office in San Bruno, Calif. to New York City

You could undertake a massive movie marathon by watching the entire Back to the Future trilogy eight and a half times (we’d recommend you do that at YouTube Movies)

An ambitious cheetah (the fastest land animal at an average running speed of 75 mph) starting in South Africa could traverse 3,600 miles of the African continent and reach Egypt

Considering how much of this footage is uploaded for personal viewing purposes only, as opposed to something of interest to the general public, YouTube’s view numbers are also notable: 3 billion views per day, a 50% increase over last year.

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 per day, says Google.

All this, and more, is shown off in the infographic below:

How did YouTube get here? By delivering the diversity and quality of content its users want, including: “live streams of music festivals to campaigns around social inspiration and change, rockstars in education to citizen-journalist coverage of global events, and you showcasing your own talent.” The company also mentions that faster uploads, support for longer videos and the recent launch of self-service live streaming to its partners have also had an impact on viewing trends.

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