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One Billion Hours of YouTube Are Watched Every Day (thenextweb.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the that's-a-lot-of-zeros dept.

YouTube announced in a blog post that people around the world are now watching a billion hours of YouTube videos every single day. According to YouTube, "If you were to sit and watch a billion hours of YouTube, it would take you over 100,000 years." Mashable reports: The milestone "represents the enjoyment of the fantastically diverse videos that creative people make every single day," Cristos Goodrow, VP of engineering at YouTube, wrote in a blog post Monday. "Around the world, people are spending a billion hours every day rewarding their curiosity, discovering great music, keeping up with the news, connecting with their favorite personalities, or catching up with the latest trend." The 1 billion figure is a 10-fold increase since 2012, YouTube said. The statistic is one that underscores YouTube's efforts to dominate the digital space. On YouTube -- which operates under the motto "Broadcast Yourself" -- users upload 400 hours of video each minute, or 65 years of video a day.

1 of 72 comments (clear)

  1. Sounds quite impossible by wvmarle · · Score: 3, Informative

    According to YouTube they have about 1 billion unique users a month. So if all were using YouTube every day, that would mean on average one hour of YouTube watching every single day. Still quite possible, but only if those users all visit YouTube every day, and it's an average, so many people watch much more than that. For me, few days pass without YouTube but normally not more than 5-10 minutes or so, mostly linked from my Facebook news feed, and sometimes tutorials and so. More than an hour in a day is rare.

    However, according to this web site, some 30 million users use YouTube every day, and 6 billion hours a month. I don't know where they get their statistics, but the daily total is only 1/5 of the YouTube statistic given above. 30 million a day is indeed nearly 1 billion a month, so that's a sensible number, based on how you count "unique users", of course. Many of those will be repeat users. Anyway, at 30 million visitors a day, each visitor has to watch 33.3 hours of video a day. That's impossible - at least in my world, where a day contains just 24 hours. If that number is also off by a factor of 5, it'd be nearly 7 hours a day, on average. Even with a full zero missing for the daily visitors number, it'd be on average over 3 hours of video per user.

    No matter how I try to look at this number, it just doesn't make sense.