Each day, 4 billion online videos streamed via YouTube

9to5 Staff | Jan 23 2012 - 9:02 am PT

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=sHPfc6whaSk]

Each day, Google’s YouTube video sharing service clocks in more than 4 billion views, a blog post over at the official YouTube blog revealed Monday. The figure represents a 25 percent increase in the past eight months as the number of people who visit YouTube soared to 800 million a month. People are now uploading about 60 hours worth of video to the service every minute, a 25 percent increase over the 48 hours of video uploads a minute in May 2011. The video above is a sample of a new interactive collection of “what happens in a YouTube second” available at onehourpersecond.com.

Yet, only 3 billion YouTube videos a week are monetized with various adverts that appear when users click on clips. Google acquired then-young startup YouTube in 2006 for an astounding $1.65 billion. The Mountain View, Calif.-headquartered Internet giant committed considerable resources to making professional content available through the video sharing service to better pursue its broader entertainment strategy centered around Google TV, a software-based project that drives set-top boxes and networked HD TVs from participating partners.

Pouring in hundreds of millions of dollars into original content production paid off, as YouTube now has over a hundred original video programming deals with media partners, such as Madonna and Jay-Z. YouTube is planning on recruiting cable networks to carve web-based TV channels for tomorrow as it recently launched action sports channels with Tony Hawk’s RIDE, The Red Bull Channel, and it signed up Reuters as its biggest news partner yet. The site has been redesigned recently with social Google+features and a nicer user interface. Google also rolled out new capabilities to YouTube’s online video editor and introduced the sought-after analytics feature that provide a deep insight by letting video owners better understand their viewership.