YouTube Hits 4bn Video Views A Day

YouTube has hit a whopping four billion daily video views, the company has said, with around 60 hours of footage uploaded every minute of the day. However, only around 10-percent of videos are monetized, Reuters reports, though that's still enough for $5bn in revenue from advertising annually, owner Google reckons.

The new figures suggest the video sharing site has seen dramatic growth over the past year. Back in May 2011, Google announced that YouTube was handling around 48 hours of new video uploaded per minute.

However, the site is also looking at other, more professional sources of video to bolster its viewership. In November 2011, Google announced a deal with Disney and Pixar to offer pay-per-view streaming of titles.

Meanwhile, there are various tweaks and improvements being added to the site, including competitive YouTube Slam head-to-head footage with a leaderboard for the most popular clips. Perhaps more useful is the new social integration and channels, which attempt to make actually finding a video from the rapidly-growing selection more straightforward.