Every now and then, I mosey on over to YouTube’s blog and check in on their stats to see how things are going. The answer? Well, pretty darn good considering this: “500 years of YouTube video are watched every day on Facebook, and over 700 YouTube videos are shared on Twitter each minute.” 500 years every day?! Mind boggling!
Here’s some more supporting evidence of our ever-increasing consumption of online video and its importance in the business world. According to a recent article from eMarketer, there is a 60% chance that a US consumer will watch an online product video and more than half of the US population is expected to watch online videos in 2012.

More impressive stats taken directly from YouTube’s site:
Traffic
- 60 hours of video are uploaded every minute, or one hour of video is uploaded to YouTube every second.
- Over 4 billion videos are viewed a day
- Over 800 million unique users visit YouTube each month
- Over 3 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube
- More video is uploaded to YouTube in one month than the 3 major US networks created in 60 years
- 70% of YouTube traffic comes from outside the US
- YouTube is localized in 39 countries and across 54 languages
- In 2011, YouTube had more than 1 trillion views or almost 140 views for every person on Earth
- YouTube Partner Program
- Created in 2007, we now have 30,000+ partners from 27 countries around the world
- We pay out millions of dollars a year to partners
- Hundreds of partners are making six figures a year
- Partner revenue has more than doubled for four years in a row
Monetization
- YouTube is monetizing over 3 billion video views per week globally
- 98 of AdAge’s Top 100 advertisers have run campaigns on YouTube and the Google Display Network
- Hundreds of advertisers are using TrueView in-stream and 60% of our in-stream ads are now skippable
Product Metrics
- We have more HD content than any other online video site
- We have thousands of full-length movies on YouTube
- 10% of YouTube’s videos are available in HD
- YouTube mobile gets over 600 million views a day, and traffic from mobile devices tripled in 2011
- The YouTube player is embedded across tens of millions of websites
Content ID
- Content ID scans over 100 years of video every day
- More than 3,000 partners use Content ID, including every major US network broadcaster, movie studio and record label
- We have more than eight million reference files (over 500,000 hours of material) in our Content ID database; it’s among the most comprehensive in the world. The number has doubled in the last year
- Over a third of YouTube’s total monetized views come from Content ID
- More than 120 million videos have been claimed by Content ID
Social
- 500 years of YouTube video are watched every day on Facebook, and over 700 YouTube videos are shared on Twitter each minute
- 100 million people take a social action on YouTube (likes, shares, comments, etc) every week
- An auto-shared tweet results in 6 new youtube.com sessions on average, and we see more than 500 tweets per minute containing a YouTube link
- Millions of subscriptions happen each day. Subscriptions allow you to connect with someone you’re interested in — whether it’s a friend, or the NBA — and keep up on their activity on the site
- More than 50% of videos on YouTube have been rated or include comments from the community
- Millions of videos are favorited every day
Which one of these stats is most impressive to you? How are you using video for your business? Share in the comments below!
Tags: 500 years, content id, emarketer, facebook, metrics, monetization, online video, online video statistics 2012, optimize, partner program, product, product video, social, traffic, twitter, video statistics, youtube

