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Humans watch a billion hours of YouTube every single day

Humans watch a billion hours of YouTube every single day

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YouTube users are now watching more than a billion hours of videos every single day, the company has announced. Put back-to-back, that's more than 100,000 years of footage, split between the millions of YouTube users across the world.

The company announced the figure in a blog post published on Monday, but said that the billion-hour milestone was actually reached last year. YouTube said that it was now focusing more on the length of time people spent watching YouTube videos, rather than the overall views a video received — an internal decision made "a few years back" that it said would help the company understand if users enjoyed a video in question.

YouTube says it's focusing on time spent watching videos now

The figure shows the continued growth of YouTube as new markets come online, but the platform's not without its problems. Some of its biggest names continue to rail against the service that made them famous, threatening to quit, or stepping away entirely. YouTube Red — the company's paid subscription service — is having trouble luring subscribers, too, with only 1.5 million people signing up as of late summer last year. In response, YouTube is making a set of changes in a bid to make its service more enticing, including the removal of unskippable 30-second commercials as of next year.