YouTube is celebrating its sixth birthday this month, and theGoogle subsidiary is doing it partly by sharing some big numbers that underscore its overwhelming dominance in the online video streaming space.
YouTube says global daily views have gone up 50 percent in the past 12 months, which means they currently handle a whopping 3 billion views per day.
To put that in some perspective: comScore said last week that the total U.S. Internet audience engaged in roughly 5.1 billion viewing sessions for the entire month of April 2011 (which also tells you something about YouTube’s global appeal).
Or as the company puts it in the announcement blog post:
“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 videos a day.”
Also worth noting: YouTube says it has exceeded over 48 hours of video uploaded to the siteevery single minute (which, they add, represents a 100 percent increase year over year).
The company names three main reasons for this growth, citing an increase in live streaming events, longer upload times and also faster upload processing times.
According to comScore’s Video Metrix, YouTube ranked as the top online video content property in April (U.S. only) with 142.7 million unique viewers, followed by VEVO with 55.2 million viewers, Yahoo Sites with 53.2 million viewers and Facebook with 46.7 million viewers.
COMMENTARY: I love YouTube, use the site all of the time both for entertainment and for my blog.
YouTube has come to define the era of online video, so let's take a look at its most popular videos of all time. Our latest update has Justin Bieber still at number 1 with Baby, which recently become the first video to earn a half a billion views! Bieber and Eminem between them make up half of the top 10. There's one new entry this month - and it's an annoying baby video! 'Tootin' Bathtub Baby Cousins' debuts at number 10, bumping the bizarre Pitbull music video out of the top 10.
We first did this list in August 2007, at which point Evolution of Dance by comedian Judson Laipply was number 1 with nearly 56 million views (it's now outside the top 10). The next update wasSeptember 2008, when Avril Lavigne's Girlfriend pop music video was number 1 with 103 million page views. In January 2010, Charlie bit my finger - again ! was number 1, with 148 million views. By the beginning of January 2011, Justin Bieber was at number 1 with over 400 million views for Baby. Here is the top 10, as of May 2011:
1. Justin Bieber - Baby ft. Ludacris; 536,581,973 views
2. Lady Gaga - Bad Romance; 375,773,647 views
3. Shakira - Waka Waka(This Time for Africa); 339,403,335 views
To view the rest of the Top 10 YouTube videos of all-time click HERE.
Courtesy of an article dated May 25, 2011 appearing in TechCrunch
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