According to a wonderful article on Mashable, YouTube users are now watching over 4 billion hours of video every single month.
The link with Google saw YouTube enter more of a commercial side with music and television. At first this change seemed to damage the community, as it was filled primarily of video bloggers who worked hard to create original content which was eventually featured on the Homepage if they worked hard enough, and usually made something funny. The vLoggers were moved to one side when Google came into the picture, and started to get all the big names involved.
Firstly, we saw many more major music labels allowing people to watch their official music videos on the site, racking up millions of views each, and then came the TV On Demand, which allows us to watch our favourite shows on the website from all the big channels, whether its a catch up from a recent episode, or even an entire old series which used to be on telly years ago.
YouTube then introduced Live, which allows people to live stream their channels and get people more involved in real time, however this has not yet kicked off on a wider scale, and is more used for big events for now that many people are likely to tune into and watch Live.
This massive combination has allowed the four billion hours to be achievable every single month, making YouTube a massive site indeed. Only Facebook and Google are bigger on Alexa, and considering Google owns YouTube, it would seem they are not pretty much dominating the internet.
YouTube is becoming more popular for a variety of reasons. We recently discussed how people are making a living on the video site, and also how the site is growing in popularity. The more people getting faster internet is the biggest effect, and unlimited plans too. More people are getting easy access to high bandwidth websites on a regular basis without hitting their internet limits, and YouTube is the first stop to use up those megabytes.
Many new channels are being created too, and a lot of news is covered. Suck My Trend even plans to expand into YouTube in the near future, however we are waiting for the right moment to do so. It’s not quite right just yet. But once we are on board, and all these new channels are racking in millions of views too, it won’t be long before YouTube is reaching out to 5 billion hours of videos being viewed every single month.
