The number of hours people spend watching videos on YouTube have picked up drastically in recent years. On Monday, the company posted on its blog that people were now watching a billion hours of videos every day on the video-sharing platform.
“Let’s put that in perspective. If you were to sit and watch a billion hours of YouTube, it would take you over 100,000 years. 100,000 years ago, our ancestors were crafting stone tools and migrating out of Africa while mammoths and mastodons roamed the Earth,” Cristos Goodrow, vice president of engineering at YouTube, said in its official blog post.
These stats are at par with all the hours in the U.S. spent watching television. According to Nielsen data reported by the Wall Street Journal on Monday, T.V. watching in the U.S. is currently at 1.25 billion hours every day and is shrinking. The viewership figures for YouTube mark a ten-fold increase from 2012, the company told the Wall Street Journal. It is also way ahead of the 116 million hours watched on Netflix and 100 million hours streamed on Facebook daily.
Google parent Alphabet Inc. does not disclose how much money the company makes from YouTube, but, according to a report, the video-sharing site made $4 billion in revenue and broke even in 2014.
Although the announcement came on Monday, the milestone had been crossed last year. The company said that it was now focusing on the length of video watching, rather than overall views received by a video.
But with big viewing figures, come big problems. Many video creators including Felix Kjellberg, better known as PewDiePie, have threatened to quit the platform. The company has also put out a paid subscription service, YouTube Red, but only 1.5 million people had signed up by summer 2016, according to the Verge. The company is changing its strategy a little, though, by removing unskippable 30-second ads by next year.
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