The popular video sharing platform YouTube has reached a new milestone. The Alphabet-owned company said that people are watching one billion hours worth of videos every single day on YouTube. Given that the platform is having more than one billion users, it's suggested that people on average watch one hour of YouTube per day.
YouTube said that the milestone was hit in 2016 as it saw a continued increase in viewership. This is a huge increase since 2015 when YouTube had surpassed 500 million hours per day, and 300 million hours a day in 2014.
The number was achieved thanks to Google that aggressively push Artificial intelligence to YouTube's recommended videos. Other factors that have contributed to the increase in viewership, include the shift from desktop PCs to mobile devices (more than 60 percent), and a growing number of people having internet access.
In 2012, YouTube changed the way it measured viewership, changing it from the number of clicks a video receives to the time spent watching videos. Since then, the number of viewership increased up to 10-folds.
"We thought the amount of time someone spent watching a video was a better way to understand whether a viewer really enjoyed it," explained YouTube.
The milestone is highlighting the popularity of YouTube that is still way beyond Facebook that in 2015 saw 100 million hours of video watched per day, and Netflix at 116 million hours per day. The popularity of YouTube starts to shadow the popularity of U.S. television that is still winning at 1.25 billion hours.
