YouTube Tells Advertisers Site Has 1 Billion Monthly Viewers

YouTube announced on Wednesday that it has reached the milestone of 1 billion monthly viewers. Google’s popular video-sharing subsidiary shared the news with advertisers at an extravagant upfronts presentation event at the YouTube Space production studio in Los Angeles, where Robert Kyncl explained that the amount of video the site streams on a monthly basis has grown 50 percent in the last year.

“The event was a preview of what YouTube has in store for a presentation it plans in May when it appears for the second straight year at the upfronts in New York, where TV executives show programming to advertisers,” notes The Hollywood Reporter.

“Nearly one out of every two people on the Internet visits YouTube,” the company explained on its blog. “Our monthly viewership is the equivalent of roughly 10 Super Bowl audiences. If YouTube were a country we’d be the third largest in the world after China and India.”

Kyncl, the global head of content partnerships for Google and YouTube, “notes that the rate of video consumption is growing even faster than the number of new viewers the site is attracting,” reports the LA Times. “YouTube now streams about 4 billion hours of video a month, up 50 percent over the last 12 months.”

“When you look at the growth in terms of users, that didn’t grow by 50 percent,” Kyncl said. “So you can see engagement per user is growing quite rapidly.”

The increasing popularity of viewing video content via smartphones and tablets “took everybody by surprise,” he added. Since roughly 25 percent of YouTube’s views now come from mobile devices, the company has invested to make videos available on devices running iOS and Android.

“Kyncl said paid subscriptions are providing an additional revenue stream for YouTube’s content creators, though he added it would require ‘a new skill set’ to coax users to take out a credit card and pay to watch videos on the site,” explains the LA Times.

“You will see a lot of experimentation with folks with those models,” Kyncl said. “Over time, a lot of people will figure it out. But it will take lots of iteration.”

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