YouTube launches site to celebrate one hour of video uploads per second milestone

Video sharing site YouTube is celebrating a major milestone: each second of the day people around the globe are now uploading one hour of video to the site -- that's a decade of videos for every day.

"Since the dawn of YouTube, we've been sharing the hours of video you upload every minute. In 2007 we started at six hours, then in 2010 we were at 24 hours, then 35, then 48, and now...60 hours of video every minute, an increase of more than 30 percent in the last eight months. In other words, you're uploading one hour of video to YouTube every second. Tick, tock, tick, tock — that's 4 hours right there!" announced Google on its YouTube blog.

To highlight the occasion Google has created an interactive website, called onehourpersecond.com. One Hour Per Second uses quirky animations and weird facts to help web users visualize just how huge YouTube's latest figures are.

Of course, uploading videos is not the only thing YouTubers are doing: they are also consuming more than four billion videos globally every day.

"That's up 25 percent in the last eight months" notes Google, "and the equivalent of more than half the world's population watching a video every day, the same number as there are US $1 bills in circulation, the same as number of years since there was water on Mars...it's a big number, and you're making it bigger every day."

According to a June 2011 study by research firm Nielsen, Americans are spending more time watching internet video than ever before. The average American spent four hours and 20 minutes per month watching videos on the web in 2011, up from three hours and 10 minutes in 2010.

In June 2011 Cisco predicted that by 2015, 1 million video minutes (674 days of non-stop video) will traverse the internet every second.