YouTube: Now serving 4 billion+ video views daily

Google’s ubiquitous video-sharing service YouTube currently serves more than 4 billion video views every day, the company told Reuters. This is a 25 percent increase over the past eight months, according to Google.

Google attributes the boost to an increase in distribution avenues, like smartphones and tablets.>

Approximately 60 hours of video is now being uploaded to YouTube every minute, a jump from the 48 hours of video that users uploaded each minute in May, when the site last reported its analytics data. At that time, the site reported 3 billion daily views. On average, YouTube has increased by about 1 billion daily views each year since 2009.

The surge in views comes as more an more Americans are watching videos online. According to a Pew Research study from July, 71 percent of Web surfers use video-sharing sites like YouTube and Vimeo. That’s a significant jump from 2010, when only 66 percent of Web users watched videos online, and a massive leap since 2006, when a mere 33 percent did so. Google purchased YouTube in 2006, for $1.65 billion.

According to Google’s financial earning released last week, the company currently brings in $5 billion in annual revenue from graphical ads that appear on YouTube videos. Of the 4 billion videos on YouTube, only about 3 billion currently run ads.

The most-viewed video of 2011, the music video for singer Rebecca Black’s “Friday,” saw about 180 million views during the year.

This article was originally posted on Digital Trends

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