YouTube Users Upload 72 Hours of Video Per Minute (and that Number’s Going Up Fast!)

YouTube celebrates its seventh birthday sometime in the month of May 2012. In honor of the occasion, the world’s largest video sharing site put together a video commemorating some highlights of the content it’s been able to stream to the internet-connected masses since sometime in May 2005, as well as a few choice stats highlighting how many millions of individuals watch the incomprehensibly large volume of programming the site streams on a daily basis.

Here’s that video:

And here’s one of the choice stats: YouTube users now upload more than 72 hours of video every minute to the video-sharing site. That’s a lot! But what’s more impressive than the fact three-days-worth of content is being uploaded to YouTube every 60 seconds is the rate at which that statistic has increased over the years.

In May 2009, YouTube reported 20 hours of video uploaded to the site every minute. By May 2011, that number had increased to 48 hours. In January 2012, a minute was the equivalent of 60 hours worth of new uploads.

That means from May 2009 to May 2011, the rate at which users uploaded content to YouTube increased by 1 hour and 10 minutes of video per minute per month. From May 2011 to January 2012, user uploades increased to 1 hour and 30 minutes of video per minute per month. And from January 2012 to May 2012, that number doubled to an increase of 3 hours of video per minute per month.

That’s crazy growth! And an indication other YouTube statistics – like how 800 million people around the world are watching more than 3 billion hours of YouTube a month – are likely going to become even more astronomical even faster in the future.