To satisfy our idle curiosity, Google has served up smorgasbord of statistics about YouTube’s phenomenal growth.
Since buying the company in November 2006, the amount of videos uploaded has risen exponentially, with 35 hours of video now being uploaded to YouTube every minute of the day.
This amounts to an 11 hour increase since March, when the company announced that it had broken through the 24 hours a minute upload milestone.
Maybe I’m Amazed
“You continue to amaze us: you’ve increased the amount of video uploaded to YouTube to 35 hours per minute,” comment a bedazzled product manager Hunter Walk, who started to get jiggy with the stats:
That breaks out to 2,100 hours uploaded every 60 minutes, or 50,400 hours uploaded to YouTube every day.
If we were to measure that in movie terms (assuming the average Hollywood film is around 120 minutes long), 35 hours a minute is the equivalent of over 176,000 full-length Hollywood releases every week.
Another way to think about it is: if three of the major US networks were broadcasting 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year for the last 60 years, they still wouldn’t have broadcast as much content as is uploaded to YouTube every 30 days.
Crazy guys!
Those kerrrazzzy pranksters at YouTube like to have a chortle too, indulging in an April Fools jape every April 1st since 2008 – here’s the roll call so far:
2008: All the links to the videos on the main page were redirected to Rick Astley’s music video “Never Gonna Give You Up”, a prank known as “Rickrolling”.
2009: When clicking on a video on the main page, the whole page turned upside down. YouTube claimed that this was a new layout
2010: YouTube temporarily released a “TEXTp” mode, which translated the colors in the videos to random upper case letters. YouTube claimed in a message that this was done in order to reduce bandwidth costs by $1 per second.
[Wikipedia]
Read about the history of YouTube here.
