YouTube has jumped to more than 4 billion video views a day, an increase of 25 percent since May.
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.
