YouTube Turns 6 Years Old!

In May of 2005, a website named YouTube launched itself into cyberspace. It celebrated its first year online by being bought out by Google for $1.65 billion. Now, it celebrates its 6^th birthday with the announcement that its global daily views have gone up by 50% in the past twelve months, with the site getting 3 billion views per day.

“That's the equivalent of nearly half the world's population watching a YouTube video each day, or every US resident watching at least nine videos a day,” said a company released blog post.

In April of 2011 alone, the site's US audience engaged in roughly 5 billion viewing sessions! In the same month, where top online video content property for the US hit 142.7 million unique views, rivals to the site, such as VEVO, Facebook, and Yahoo sites, hit only 55.2 million, 46.7 million, and 53.2 million respectively.

It seems that since it first started, the company's dominance in the online video streaming world has never stopped. Statistics have shown that the hours of video uploaded to the site each minute has increased a 100% year over year. From 8 hours of video uploaded each minute in 2007, to 35 hours of video uploaded per minute in December of 2010, and now over 48 hours of video uploaded every minute!

The company attributes its rapid growth and success to their decisions to increase live streaming events, faster upload processing times, and longer upload times. They've also begun adding professional content, including movies and full-length television shows.

Google is yet to announce whether the site has been a profitable acquisition or not.