We had the chance to interview YouTube Product Manager Hunter Walk at Gigaom’s NewTeeVee conference and talk to him about some of the milestones YouTube has reached since it was founded in 2005 (Warning, my voice is LOUD).
Along with the impressive statistic that there are now 50,000 hours of new video uploaded daily (35 hours of video uploaded every minute, up from 24 hours a minute a few months ago), Walk revealed that YouTube now boasts over 2 billion video playbacks a day, 150 million of those being on mobile devices.
Walk also said that the company’s two main priorities are improving personalization features as well as search. With hundreds of YouTube partners making six figures a year, Walk says that YouTube will be focusing in 2011 on giving its community more tools to create better content, such as a livestreaming functionality for all users as well editing tools and improved ways of finding programming. Says Walk, “We’re not really a media company, we’re technology driven.”
One of the ways YouTube is using technology to improve user experience is through the recently launched experiment YouTube Topics, which are metadata tags that if implemented will eventually allow you to search YouTube for stuff like whether a music clip is live, in HD or about snowboarding, for example.
Walk said that YouTube is committed to making the specific content people want more accessible, “It’s a challenge, how do we find the few hours that everyone cares about? How do we program for you, and how do we give you an easier way to browse through the site?”
Whatever the answer is, they’re working on it.
YouTube provides a platform for you to create, connect and discover the world’s videos. The company recently redesigned the site around its hundreds of millions of channels. Partners from major movie studios, record labels, web original creators, viral stars, and millions more all have channels on YouTube. YouTube is predominantly an ad-supported platform, but also offers rental options for a growing number of movie titles. YouTube was founded in 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, who...
Hunter Walk is the director of Product Management at Google, focused primarily on YouTube. He joined Google in December 2003 after serving as a member of the founding team of Second Life at Linden Lab from 2001 to 2003.
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