Google announced today that its YouTube site now streams an average of over one billion streams each day, representing yet another milestone in the site's prodigious growth.
"Three years ago today, Steve and I stood out in front of our offices and jokingly crowned ourselves the burger kings of media. We'd just made headlines by joining with Google in our shared goal of organizing the world's information (in our case, video) and making it easily and quickly accessible to anyone, anywhere," wrote YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley on YouTube's official blog. "Today, I'm proud to say that we have been serving well over a billion views a day on YouTube. This is great moment in our short history and we owe it all to you."
This news comes two days after a CNET report that Google CEO Eric Schmidt thought YouTube was really only worth between $600 million and $700 million, meaning that Google paid more than double what YouTube was worth when it bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2006 -- nearly as much as CBS paid for CNET.
Hurley attributes YouTube's growth to its clips loading quickly, "clip culture [being] here to stay," and the way it has crowdsourced the encoding and uploading of video content to its users, who, according to YouTube ContentID product manager Dave King, upload 20 hours of video to YouTube every minute.
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