YouTube surpasses 1B daily viewing hours

Dive Brief:

YouTube now sees more than 1 billion hours of daily video views, according to an article in The Wall Street Journal. Those figures put the Google-owned video portal on a path to exceed U.S. TV's daily viewership.
The milestone represents a 10x increase in views since 2012, largely driven by YouTube's artificial intelligence-powered video recommendation engine, per the Journal.
YouTube expands its video content by 400 hours of uploaded video each minute, equaling 65 years of video each day. YouTube Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan told the Journal that the platform's "corpus of content" grows richer by the minute and that machine learning algorithms serve YouTube users with content they want to see.

Dive Insight:

YouTube has been well established as the dominant portal for online video, but the sheer amount of content uploaded to and consumed on the platform on a daily basis might still be striking to many.

The fact that YouTube's raw audience appears poised to surpass that of traditional television underscores the importance for marketers to prioritize a more concrete digital video strategy as the medium takes over, not just on desktop, but also on mobile devices.

Alphabet, which owns both Google and YouTube, has been putting a stronger emphasis on how YouTube is becoming an essential part of building out its advertising revenue. On a recent Alphabet earnings call, an analyst noted that YouTube might be the "heir apparent" to Alphabet's gargantuan search business, and industry bellwethers, notably eMarketer, have hammered home the massive share of video advertising revenue YouTube now controls in the U.S.

While YouTube is a veteran of digital video, other social platforms are more eager to get in on the space, potentially providing stiffer competition. Facebook, in particular, has suggested that most of the real estate on its News Feed might be video within the next several years, and the social network has been active in bridging video offerings to TV, notably through a recently-unveiled set-top box application.