YouTube Announces That It Has Hit One Billion Monthly Users, Which Is Roughly Ten Super Bowl Audiences

Drew Olanoff

Drew Olanoff has over 10 years of marketing, PR, customer service and support, relationship building and management, product management, and technical support experience in multiple verticals. Online, including mobile. He prides himself on being a connector. Connecting people, stories, information. He has worked under some amazingly talented and gifted PR pros while working for startups as a “Director of Community”,... → Learn More

Wednesday, March 20th, 2013
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Today, YouTube announced that it has hit a billion monthly users, which is an extremely insane metric. We know that YouTube is the go-to place for silly, interesting and important videos, but these numbers are something that even TV networks dream of.

The great part for YouTube is that this means that online video ad spend will go up since the eyeballs appear to be ready, willing and able. It’s not only advertisers that are rushing YouTube, budding music artists are heading there too, and making a career from the attention that they get.

Fueling this insane growth is the availability of YouTube on all devices, plus a growing interest from “Generation C,” which happens to love to curate. That content curation means that people are sitting in front of their device and watching video after video with genres that range from politics to cartoons.

Here’s what YouTube had to say about the milestone:

In the last eight years you’ve come to YouTube to watch, share and fall in love with videos from all over the world. Tens of thousands of partners have created channels that have found and built businesses for passionate, engaged audiences. Advertisers have taken notice: all of the Ad Age Top 100 brands are now running campaigns on YouTube. And today, we’re announcing a new milestone: YouTube now has more than a billion unique users every single month.

Content creation is getting easier now, with every mobile device able to upload videos in minutes. Even YouTube caught on to this and launched a stripped-down version of its app called Capture, which lets anyone grab video and upload it with two taps.

To give the news some more color, YouTube broke the numbers down a bit:

What does a billion people tuning into YouTube look like?
- Nearly one out of every two people on the Internet visits YouTube.
- Our monthly viewership is the equivalent of roughly ten Super Bowl audiences.
- If YouTube were a country, we’d be the third largest in the world after China and India.
- PSY and Madonna would have to repeat their Madison Square Garden performance in front of a packed house 200,000 more times. That’s a lot of Gangnam Style!

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These numbers, along with the adoption of YouTube by seemingly every generation, means that Google’s gut feeling on acquiring them was right.

$1.65 billion certainly feels like a steal now. That’s a little more than what? A dollar for each monthly user*?

*Not actual math.

[Photo via iJustine]


Company: YouTube
Website: youtube.com
Launch Date: February 2005
Funding: $11.5M

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...

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Company: Google
Website: google.com
Launch Date: September 7, 1998
IPO: NASDAQ:GOOG

Google provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of online tools and platforms including: Gmail, Maps, YouTube, and Google+, the company’s extension into the social space. Most of its Web-based products are free, funded by Google’s highly integrated online advertising platforms AdWords and AdSense. Google promotes the idea that advertising should be highly targeted and relevant to users thus providing...

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