YouTube has revealed that it hit a milestone daily viewing figure late last year.
In a company blog post entitled “You know what’s cool? A billion hours”, YouTube confirmed that viewers stream an average of one billion hours of content every day, stating that this milestone “represents the enjoyment of the fantastically diverse videos that creative people make every single day”. This represents a ten-fold increase in viewership since 2012.
They refer to their decision to focus on the amount of time viewers spent watching a video rather than how many views the video got as a way of understanding if people were enjoying a video. This is seen by the company as a better way to gauge viewer enjoyment in order to “make YouTube a more engaging place for fans and creators”.
The Wall Street Journal cites YouTube’s development of artificial intelligence in creating personalised video suggestions as a key area of engagement growth. According to a former YouTube staffer, instead of simply suggesting videos based on videos other users have watched after the current one, YouTube partners with Google Brain to work out viewers’ potential related interests.
This figure puts YouTube engagement far ahead of Facebook Video – frequently touted as a potential contender to YouTube’s throne – which in January 2016 reported 100 million hours of daily watch time.
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See how YouTube’s Director of Diverse Marketing, Oona King has been advocating for better diversity in advertisements. Elsewhere, we spoke to Liam Williams about his new YouTube mockumentary Pls Like.
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