Today's YouTube announcement also goes hand in hand with a new feature release designed to make the site a tad more social. Now after you watch a video, you'll be able to immediately click to record a video response via your webcam.
According to YouTube, the hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute has been growing astronomically since mid-2007, when it was just a measly six hours per minute. Then, 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."
Now, just a few months later and we've hit the 20 hour per minute milestone, which means that for every second in time about 33 minutes of video make it to YouTube, and that for any given day 28,800 hours of video are uploaded in total.
With its new feature that lets users record video responses directly from video embeds, these numbers will likely grow even more. Although you could already record a video response using your webcam, the update makes it a one-click process to do so right from the video itself. Now, you have an opportunity to capture your two cents from wherever you come across a YouTube video on the Web.
Even though YouTube is seeing such massive upload numbers, and we think that speaks to the strength of their community, they still have monetization challenges that are only exacerbated by the rising bandwidth costs required to support such an enormous load. Bandwidth costs are already proving to be the bane of YouTube's existence, possibly resulting in $470 million in loses for this year alone.