YouTube hits one billion monthly viewers

Half of the entire Internet population visits YouTube every month, more than 10 Super Bowl audiences

The one billion monthly user club is an exclusive one. First it was Facebook who hit the milestone last year, and now the club officially has a new member: YouTube.

The user-generated video serviced announced the milestone in a blogpost on Wednesday.

"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," YouTube wrote.

To put the number in perspective, YouTube also released some impressive stats. For example, this number means that 50% of the entire Internet population is visitng YouTube every month. It is equal to around 10 Super Bowl audience put together.

In fact, if YouTube were a country, it would be the third largest in the entire world, behind on China and India. And to get up to one billion people, PSY and Madonna would have to repeat their Madison Square Garden performance in front of a packed house 200,000 more times.

"From the aspiring filmmaker in his basement and the next great pop musician, to the fans all around the world who tune in, subscribe and share their favorite videos with the planet, thank you for making YouTube what it is today. You have truly created something special."

YouTube was founded eight years ago, and was bought by Google for $1.65 billion in 2006. Since then, no other user-generated online video sites that have come up in that time have been able to challenge it for supremacy. Even all these years later, YouTube remains the go-to place for people to put their videos if they want them to be seen.

In the most recent comScore report on online video ranking in the United States, Google was far and away the leader.

Google sites, driven mostly by YouTube, came away with 150.7 million unique viewers, who watched 362.1 minutes of video. In a distant second was Facebook, with just over 61 million viewers, who only watched 19.9 minutes of video. No other site even had 50 million viewers.

It was reported yesterday that Yahoo was looking to buy up 75% of Dailymotion, perhaps in a move to compete with YouTube. But that will be a difficult task.

Dailymotion is the 12th largest video website in the world, garnering 116 million by unique users in January, according to comScore. That is less than Google's viewer numbers in just the United States, where Dailymotion ranks as the number 22 among video websites by unique viewers.

(Image source: https://mashable.com)