Users watch 1 bn hours of YouTube every single day

Google yesterday said people were watching about 1 billion hours of YouTube every single day. Google made the announcement on YouTube's official blog yesterday and thanked users and content providers, and also detailed an insight into why it measured time watched instead of ''views.''

Google explained that the metric used by the company to gauge success or failure was simply how many times the video was viewed.

However, the company quickly realised that the amount of time a viewer was held captive was far more representative of its popularity, since often people start watching videos but do not finish watching it.

Google therefore changed the way it conducted its analysis, and the way content providers conducted theirs by proxy, and implemented it only a few years ago.

The service had since then experienced rapid growth in popularity which, in turn, had enabled many media providers to take better stock of the content  and provide better media.

It had also encouraged outside entities – such as Comcast – to create new platforms for viewing such content.

Google was also quick to acknowledge that YouTube achievements did not belong to the company, and as an open platform for content sharing and discovery, the popularity of the service needed to be credited to users and content creators.

You Tube said that the billion-hour milestone was actually reached last year. It said said it was now focusing more on the length of time people spent watching YouTube videos, rather than the overall views a video received.

According to commentators, though the figure pointed to the continued growth of YouTube, the platform had its share of problems. Some of the biggest names continued to fault the service that made them famous and had threatened to quit or walk away.

YouTube Red - the company's paid subscription service had failed to appeal to enough subscribers, and notched up only 1.5 million people subscribes till late summer last year.