If you were to sit and watch a billion hours of YouTube, it would take you over 100,000 years.
Even as streaming services like Amazon Prime Video and Netflix are gaining popularity, Google‘s YouTube is still the largest video streaming platform with over one billion users worldwide. Google in it’s latest report has now revealed that people are watching a billion hours of videos on YouTube every single day. A billion hours of videos in a day!! Honestly, I need my mathematics teacher to comprehend that for me. But the nice people at Google have broken that down for us — “If you were to sit and watch a billion hours of YouTube, it would take you over 100,000 years.”
While those were the figures that Google revealed, the Wall Street Journal followed that report with one of their own, which puts a perspective to these figures with a comparison. So, present 1 billion user base is about ten times the viewership reported by YouTube in 2012. The YouTube figure also dwarfs the reported figures from Netflix and Facebook last year, which claimed 116 million and 100 million hours of daily consumption in early 2016. YouTube’s volume has also helped the parent company, Alphabet, make profits. The company achieved 22 percent year-over-year to $26.02 billion, primarily driven by mobile searches and YouTube.
YouTube’s dominance can also be attributed to the constant updates and improved algorthims that have helped the platform be easy-to-use for both publishers and viewers. For its key markets like India, the company rolled out features like offline mode to help users consume YouTube videos without exhausting mobile data. Google recently rolled out the beta version of YouTube Go, which is an entirely new app made from scratch. The app aims to give users more control over how much data is consumed while watching or saving a particular video. ALSO READ: YouTube Go Beta now available for download in India; here’s how it works
Earlier this month, YouTube began allowing popular vloggers on its platform to broadcast on-the-go videos using mobile devices, posing a challenge to the live streaming features offered by the likes of Facebook and Twitter. Although the idea of livestreaming itself isn’t new to YouTube, with the feature rolled out six year ago on the platform.
Additionally, what came in as a beautiful surprise, Google plans to scrap those annoying 30-second unskippable video ads on YouTube. Reportedly, Google realised that these video ads were not particularly popular, especially among data-capped mobile users. Consequently, the company is pushing shorter formats to advertisers, such as the six-second unskippable ad that it launched last year. Unfortunately, the change will not come into effect until 2018. ALSO READ: YouTube to scrap the annoying unskippable 30-second ads
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