YouTube turns eight, has more than 100 hours of video uploaded every minute

Video-sharing service YouTube has now turned 8, and according to the official YouTube blog , more than 100 hours of videos are uploaded to the service every minute. That amounts to more than four days worth of videos being uploaded every minute. The blog also announces that every month, more than 1 billion people visit YouTube to watch videos.

“Millions of partners are creating content for YouTube and more than 1,000 companies worldwide have mandated a one-hour mid-day break to watch nothing but funny YouTube videos. Well, we made that last stat up, but that would be cool (the other stats are true),” says the YouTube blog in a tongue-in-cheek manner.

YouTube is now eight years old

The video-sharing service was originally created by three former PayPal employees in 2005. After the major amount of success it saw, the service was bought over by Google in 2006 for $1.65 billion and has since been operating as a subsidiary of the search giant.

According to a story that has often been repeated, creators Chad Hurley and Steve Chen developed the idea for YouTube during the early months of 2005 after they experienced problems while sharing videos that had been shot at a dinner party at Chen’s apartment. However, Chen has commented that the origin story for YouTube “was probably very strengthened by marketing ideas around creating a story that was very digestible”

YouTube hit its first major milestone in July 2005 when the company announced that 65,000 videos were being uploaded every day and that the website was receiving 100 million video views per day. It has been estimated that in 2007, YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet did back in the year 2000.