As reported on TechCrunch.
by DREW OLANOFF
Today, YouTube announced that it has hit a billion monthly users, which is an extremely insane metric. We know that YouTube is the go-to place for silly, interesting and important videos, but these numbers are something that even TV networks dream of.
The great part for YouTube is that this means that online video ad spend will go up since the eyeballs appear to be ready, willing and able. It’s not only advertisers that are rushing YouTube, budding music artists are heading there too, and making a career from the attention that they get.
Fueling this insane growth is the availability of YouTube on all devices, plus a growing interest from “Generation C,” which happens to love to curate. That content curation means that people are sitting in front of their device and watching video after video with genres that range from politics to cartoons.
Here’s what YouTube had to say about the milestone:
In the last eight years you’ve come to YouTube to watch, share and fall in love with videos from all over the world. Tens of thousands of partners have created channels that have found and built businesses for passionate, engaged audiences. Advertisers have taken notice: all of the Ad Age Top 100 brands are now running campaigns on YouTube. And today, we’re announcing a new milestone: YouTube now has more than a billion unique users every single month.
Content creation is getting easier now, with every mobile device able to upload videos in minutes. Even YouTube caught on to this and launched a stripped-down version of its app called Capture, which lets anyone grab video and upload it with two taps.
To give the news some more color, YouTube broke the numbers down a bit:
What does a billion people tuning into YouTube look like?
– Nearly one out of every two people on the Internet visits YouTube.
– Our monthly viewership is the equivalent of roughly ten Super Bowl audiences.
– If YouTube were a country, we’d be the third largest in the world after China and India.
– PSY and Madonna would have to repeat their Madison Square Garden performance in front of a packed house 200,000 more times. That’s a lot of Gangnam Style!
These numbers, along with the adoption of YouTube by seemingly every generation, means that Google’s gut feeling on acquiring them was right.
$1.65 billion certainly feels like a steal now. That’s a little more than what? A dollar for each monthly user*?
*Not actual math.