40% Of YouTube Traffic Now Comes From Mobile Devices

YouTube has been the most popular video streaming site on the Internet for a long time and it's traffic continues to grow. YouTube still faces the challenge of making money off all the traffic it has, but the video streaming service is doing okay. Google recently announced that 40% of all YouTube traffic now comes from mobile devices.

That is a significant increase from only a few short years ago. In 2012, only 25% of YouTube's traffic came from mobile devices and in 2011, only 6% of its traffic was courtesy of mobile users. The uptick in YouTube's mobile user traffic is no surprise considering how quickly sales of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets are growing. As sales of mobile devices continues to grow, the sales of PCs, which is the traditional source of traffic for YouTube, continues to decline.

YouTube isn't the only online company seen much of its traffic transition to mobile devices from computers. Facebook recently reported that 819 million of its total of 1.15 billion users during Q2 2013 came from mobile devices. That means during Q2 of 2013 73% of all Facebook traffic was generated by mobile devices.

YouTube has been working on its mobile delivery service since 2007 when there was very little demand for mobile streaming. YouTube has been transcoding videos for mobile device consumption for a long time and it's early preparations are paying off. YouTube announced recently that it also plans to allow users to save and watch videos off-line starting in November. That new feature will undoubtedly help increase its mobile viewers significantly, as people can download video over Wi-Fi and watch them wherever they go rather than having to worry about data streaming and overages.

SOURCE: TechCrunch