14 DAY TRIAL // For all its diversity, the web is surprisingly centered on just a handful of sites. And for those few sites, the only way to go is up, apparently. MySpace would argue with that, of course, but in YouTube's case, it holds true. The biggest video site in the world is only getting bigger and its users, who include pretty much everyone on the planet at this point, are now uploading 24 hours' worth of video every minute, up from 20 hours several months ago.
"In May of last year, we announced 20 hours of video were uploaded to YouTube every minute. We then challenged you to keep the uploads coming to see whether or not we could get a day’s worth of video – 24 hours – uploaded in the same brief time span," Hunter Walk, director of Product Management at Google, wrote. "Today, we’re announcing that you’ve done it! In just 60 quick ticks of the second hand, more than a full, action-packed day in Jack Bauer’s life is now uploaded to YouTube."
Whichever way you look at it, that's a lot of content, luckily YouTube has one of the largest audiences on the planet. With so much content, most of it must be of absolutely no interest to the world at large, not that there's anything wrong with that, but, thanks to the 'one thousand monkeys with typewriters' theory, some of the videos are bound to be interesting. By sheer size alone, YouTube and online video on the whole are going to bury traditional media creators.
Still, even as it grows, YouTube hasn't yet solved the very basic problem of actually making money from the video it hosts. The site has been intensifying and diversifying its efforts to monetize the videos, but, as far as the official word is concerned, it is not profitable yet. Things may be changing this year and projections show YouTube bringing in a significant amount of money by the year's end. But its costs are also growing, as more and more people upload videos to the site.