This has been true for some time, but now more than ever, it’s impossible for any one person (or even a team of reasonable size) to keep up with all the clips uploaded to YouTube. According to an official blog post, about 20 hours of video are introduced to the site in every minute of real time.
Ryan Junee, a product manager, marked past milestones by writing, “In mid-2007, six hours of video were uploaded to YouTube every minute. Then it grew to eight hours per minute, then 10, then 13. In January of this year, it became 15 hours of video uploaded every minute, the equivalent of Hollywood releasing over 86,000 new full-length movies into theaters each week.”
And now we’re at 20, with no end in sight. Junee, in fact, is already aiming for the rate of 24 hours of video uploaded every minute, and a new feature (an after-the-clip icon that encourages people to record video responses) has been introduced to promote more user participation.
In somewhat related news, individuals got a little more involved than the YouTube Team might have liked yesterday when folks from 4chan and eBaum’s World celebrated “Porn Day” by uploading all sorts of NSFW clips.
But at the 20-hours-a-minute rate, YouTube would have needed at least 1,200 people on hand to manually screen every second of new video, and so catching and removing the clips has been a less-than-instantaneous process.
