YouTube Turns 6 Years Old, Daily Views Shoot Up To 3 Billion (Yes, 3 Billion. Daily.)

YouTube is celebrating its sixth birthday this month, and the Google subsidiary is doing it partly by sharing some big numbers that underscore its overwhelming dominance in the online video streaming space.

YouTube says global daily views have gone up 50 percent in the past 12 months, which means they currently handle a whopping 3 billion views per day.

To put that in some perspective: comScore said last week that the total U.S. Internet audience engaged in roughly 5.1 billion viewing sessions for the entire month of April 2011 (which also tells you something about YouTube’s global appeal).

Or as the company puts it in the announcement blog post:

“That’s the equivalent of nearly half the world’s population watching a YouTube video each day, or every U.S. resident watching at least nine videos a day.”

Also worth noting: YouTube says it has exceeded over 48 hours of video uploaded to the site every single minute (which, they add, represents a 100 percent increase year over year).

The company names three main reasons for this growth, citing an increase in live streaming events, longer upload times and also faster upload processing times.

According to comScore’s Video Metrix, YouTube ranked as the top online video content property in April (U.S. only) with 142.7 million unique viewers, followed by VEVO with 55.2 million viewers, Yahoo Sites with 53.2 million viewers and Facebook with 46.7 million viewers.

Also read these recent posts for more perspective:

Google Partners With Sony, Universal And Warner Brothers For YouTube Movies

Royal Wedding Viewed More Than 100M Times On YouTube

Citi: Google’s YouTube Revenues Will Pass $1 Billion In 2012

comScore: 170 Million U.S. Internet Users Watched Online Video Last Month

YouTube Passes One Billion Subscriptions