YouTube Plays 4 Billion Videos Every Day

To no one's surprise, YouTube keeps on growing. The site has been breaking records since early after being launched and the numbers it sometimes reveals are so large, they're hard to put into context.

The latest official figures coming from YouTube paint a familiar picture. The site is now streaming four billion videos every day. That's a 25 percent increase over the past eight months.

What's more, it's double the figure YouTube revealed for its fifth birthday, almost two years ago, when it celebrated the two billion streams per day milestone. It took YouTube less than two years to double the figure, roughly doubling its traffic and its costs.

A little over three years ago, YouTube was only streaming one billion videos per day. While growth seems to have slowed down, YouTube will go past five billion views per day soon enough, especially as more and more people access the site from their mobile phones or tablets.

Even as viewing numbers go up, YouTube is still only monetizing a small number of those views, only three billion per week.

Not only is YouTube seeing more viewers, more videos are uploaded as well. The last official figure was 48 hours of video uploaded every minute. That's the number provided for its sixth birthday last year. Now, it's seeing 60 hours of video uploaded every minute.

None of those numbers should be truly surprising, YouTube is one of the biggest sites on the planet and gets 800 million unique visitors each month. That's about as many as Facebook is seeing. Google as a whole gets a little over one billion unique visitors each month.

Doubtless, these numbers will continue to grow, especially since there's no credible competitor in sight. YouTube's biggest hurdle though is converting usage into revenue.