Remember in March when we shared with you that more than 24 hours of video being uploaded to YouTube every minute? Well, you continue to amaze us: you’ve increased the amount of video uploaded to YouTube to 35 hours per minute. That breaks out to 2,100 hours uploaded every 60 minutes, or 50,400 hours uploaded to YouTube every day. If we were to measure that in movie terms (assuming the average Hollywood film is around 120 minutes long), 35 hours a minute is the equivalent of over 176,000 full-length Hollywood releases every week. Another way to think about it is: if three of the major US networks were broadcasting 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year for the last 60 years, they still wouldn’t have broadcast as much content as is uploaded to YouTube every 30 days.


As you can see from the above chart, the number of uploads to YouTube have more than doubled in the last two years. How come? Here are some of the factors contributing to the growth:
  • The time limit for videos uploaded by users increased by 50% from 10 to 15 minutes.
  • The upload file size increased over the last few years by more than 10x to 2GB via our standard uploader.
  • Mobile phones have improved dramatically in how quickly and easily they upload videos to YouTube.
  • More companies integrating our APIs to support upload from outside of YouTube.com (Activision’s Call of Duty Black Ops. as one very cool example where you can record and share video footage from within the game).
So, what happens in 35 hours? Here are just some of the things that can happen in that time frame:
  • A team can set the record for the longest soccer (eh hem... futbol) match in history.
  • Someone can drive non-stop from YouTube's headquarters in San Bruno, CA to Chicago, IL.
  • You could fly over half-way around the world in a balloon.
Clearly, you are able to tackle some of our most daunting challenges. So it is with that in mind that we throw down another heavy gauntlet: upload 48 hours of video every minute. That’s right: two full days and 100% growth of what we achieved back in March of 2010.

Hunter Walk, Director of product management, recently watched “FD Sonoma: Tilt-Shift Formula Drift”