YouTube Uploads 35 Hours Of Video Every MinuteYouTube Uploads 35 Hours Of Video Every Minute

How Firesheep Can Hijack Web Sessions

Clips filled with Justin Bieber wannabes. Skate-boarding dogs. Highly technical how-to demonstrations. These are only some of the content offerings making up the more than 35 hours of video YouTubers now upload every minute.

In March, users uploaded more than 24 hours of video per minute, Hunter Walk, director of product management at the video social networking site, said in a blog. Within only eight months, traffic has increased by almost 69%.

"That breaks out to 2,100 hours uploaded every 60 minutes, or 50,400 hours uploaded to YouTube every day," Walk said. "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."

YouTube credited several capabilities for the upload growth. In October, the site hit the 1 billionth subscription mark.

In July, for example, the video-sharing site began allowing content creators to upload videos with running times in excess of 10 minutes. Also, over the last few years, the upload file size has grown by more than 10 times, to 2GB, via YouTube's standard uploader, Walk said.

As mobile phones' capabilities have improved, users can more easily and quickly upload videos to YouTube, he said. And more companies are integrating the site's APIs to support upload from outside YouTube.com, so users can record and share footage. Activision's “Call of Duty: Black Ops,” for example, lets users capture and share video from within the popular game, said Walk.

"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," Walk said.