No! Your eyes aren’t deceiving you, the figure cited in the headline is perfectly in line. If you had ever doubted the mass popularity and growth of YouTube, you should know that it is the biggest video streaming platform online. And YouTube has added another feather to its milestone hat by lunging over the billion hours of content per day mark last year.
While YouTube enables us to interact with a cohort of analytics but there are some metrics, which neither can we measure nor fathom. You can go look at any video’s views, like or dislike count underneath the video but it is harder to understand how long a user watched. The company has already started tracking this metric years ago and it has been made available to content creators (total time watched) as well. With regards to the same, it has been able to conclude that viewers are currently watching a billion hours worth of content in a single day.
I know this is crazy to even believe and comprehend and YouTube itself is equally psyched to have achieved this milestone. Speaking on this milestone in an official blog post, Cristos Goodrow, VP of engineering at YouTube says,
While everyone seemed focused on how many views a video got, we thought the amount of time someone spent watching a video was a better way to understand whether a viewer really enjoyed it. It wasn’t an easy call, but we thought it would help us make YouTube a more engaging place for creators and fans.
But, how did it achieve this milestone in such a small span of time? Well, the answer is pretty obvious. Machine learning. YouTube has powered its recommendation engine with regularly updated machine learning algorithms. But, this is also accompanied by an increase in mobile viewership (due to more widespread internet access) and content creators over the last couple of years, says WSJ. It is also part due to the introduction of new features like Community and social messaging features, which push users to spend more time in the app.
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To further put things into perspective, YouTube has offered some factoids alongside this milestone achievement. It says that it would take as much as 100,000 years for an individual to watch a billion hours of video content. And what’s even more mind-boggling, if the user spent 100,000 light years traveling in space, they can reach from one end of the milky way to another. YouTube, however, is not getting ahead of itself. And Facebook and Netflix have a lot of catching up to do. They’ve just crossed about 100 million hours per day each.
YouTube, however, is not getting ahead of itself. And Facebook and Netflix have a lot of catching up to do. They’ve just crossed about 100 million hours per day each. The former is trying to keep them at an arm’s length by rolling out even more new features, including live broadcasting for most.
