YouTube hits 2 billion video views a day

Google’s video-sharing site YouTube is now getting more than two billion views per day.

On the eve of its fifth birthday, YouTube claims to have hit the two billion video views a day mark, up from the one billion daily views it recorded last October.

The site has come a long way since its official launch in December 2005, when around 8 million videos were being watched per day.

Less than a year later, it was getting as many as 100 million video views a day, with users uploading more than 65,000 videos daily.

However, since Google acquired the site – for $1.65 billion in October 2006 – YouTube has launched around the world, embedded InVideo ads, unveiled a full mobile video catalogue, added full-length television and film content, launched pre-roll ads and set up 3D and HD content.

This year alone, the site unveiled its redesign, posted a live-streaming of President Obama’s Youtube interview and now gets up to 24 hours of video content uploaded every minute.

YouTube claims to be monetising over a billion video views per week globally, while its partner ad revenue more than tripled in 2009, and the number of advertisers using display ads on the site has increased 10-fold in the past year.