Eponymous video streaming website YouTube is today celebrating its sixth birthday, while mobile advertising platform AdMob is marking one year as a Google property. In separate blog posts today both the YouTube and AdMob teams shared some impressive numbers showing how the two services continue to grow.
First up, YouTube has announced they are now serving 3 billion videos per day – yes, billion. That’s a 50 percent increase in daily views since this time last year. The site is also now seeing 48 hours of video uploaded every minute, which is a full 100% increase from this time a year ago. The staggering thing here is that YouTube – which has become the de facto standard in internet video – seems to be not just growing, but accelerating their growth. The proliferation of video recording functionality in smartphones is most likely to blame, with connected devices allowing users to upload their films with the click of a button.
YouTube are not only patting themselves on the back, but their users too. In the blog post the YouTube team credited the site’s vast userbase with their amazing success – “You’ve made YouTube successful because it’s a reflection of you and your world.” Of course, all success is relative – while YouTube is certainly succeeding in the traffic sense, the site is still a long way from being a profitable enterprise.
Meanwhile, across the Google campus the AdMob team have cause to congratulate themselves too. The mobile advertising service, which was eventually acquired by Google after a tug-of-war with Apple a year ago, is now serving 2.7 billion mobile ads per day. Again, the cause of this growth is the humble smartphone and the apps they run – many of which carry AdMob’s content.
Mobile growth is continuing to accelerate – Google cites a Cisco study that shows average smartphone data usage has doubled in the past year. This can only be good news for these two Google divisions, both of whom are reliant on the mobile sector to fuel their continued expansion.