Whatever you were just doing in the very second it took you to start reading this sentence, an entire hour of video was uploaded to YouTube. And yes, another hour of video was uploaded per each subsequent second after that original one. And so on.
That’s the big news from YouTube today, who announced on their blog earlier that they are now clocking 60 hours of uploaded video every minute. That is, in a word, unreal.
YouTube put together a fun interactive visualization over at onehourpersecond.com that shows you what the rest of the world does in the time it took to upload some videos. One of my favorites in spite of the lack of sense it makes to me: “In 38 minutes of uploads to YouTube, our ostrich is still running at full speed, traveling 98,040 miles.”
Additionally, they also calculate that they’ve exceeded four billion video views worldwide every single day. They put it in perspective: “That’s up 25 percent in the last eight months and the equivalent of more than half the world’s population watching a video every day, the same number as there are US $1 bills in circulation, the same as number of years since there was water on Mars…it’s a big number, and you’re making it bigger every day.” Lots and lots of videos happening in your face, humanity.
And because video is their thing, of course you knew they’d have a video to mark this milestone:
In order to mark my own observance of YouTube’s achievement, I’m going to share some of my favorite videos with you here. Hope you like them as much as I do.