YouTube surpasses 1billion daily viewing hours

According to a recent article in The Wall Street Journal, YouTube now sees more than 1 billion of hours of daily video views, which puts the Google-owned video portal on the path to exceed the U.S. TV’s daily viewership and far surpasses Australia’s.

This momentous milestone demonstrates an increase in views since 2012 of over 10 times, and is largely driven by the platform’s intelligence-powered video recommendation engine.

Over 400 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube each minute which equals 65 years of video each day (man, that must take some serious storage facilities!). YouTube Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan told the Journal that the platform’s “corpus of content” grows richer by the minute and that machine learning algorithms serve YouTube users with content they want to see.

Whilst YouTube has been well established as the dominant portal for online video, the sheer volume of content uploaded and consumed on a daily basis still boggles the mind.

While YouTube is a relative veteran of digital video, other social platforms eager to get a share of the pie, potentially providing stiffer competition. Facebook, in particular, has suggested that most of the real estate on its News Feed might be video within the next few years, and the social network has been active in bridging video offerings to TV, most notably through a recently-unveiled set-top box application.

So what does this mean for online marketing? 

Well, the fact that the raw audience is set to surpass traditional audience viewership just highlights the importance for marketers to have a dedicated digital video strategy, not just on desktop, but also on mobile devices.

It’s no longer a matter of missed opportunity if you don’t incorporate video, but whether you’ve missed the boat entirely.