YouTube receives over 1 billion visitors

YouTube said it now had over one billion visitors using its video site each month, watching everything from clips of cute kittens to scenes of social unrest around the world.

The milestone announced yesterday, comes as a landmark in the evolution of the site from its 2005 launch 2005 to one of the most influential forces in today's media landscape.

The site hit the 1-billion threshold five months after Facebook Inc claimed its online social network had reached that figure.

According to analysts, the vast audience, had given the owner of the company, Google Inc, an additional lucrative channel for the sale of online ads beyond its dominant internet search engine.

YouTube was acquired by the internet search company for $1.76 billion in 2006 when the video site had an estimated 50 million users worldwide.

In late 2011, YouTube overhauled its site to allow its content to be viewed according to distinct categories at it was found to be better at allowing advertisers to focus on certain genres of content like beauty or music.

In 2012, YouTube launched 96 channels with around $100 million in funding to aid accelerated growth, at times partnering with prominent Hollywood producers and directors that had made it big in movies or TV but not on the internet including "CSI'' creator Anthony Zuiker. The company later undertook to allocate another $200 million for marketing the channels to boost viewers.

Meanwhile, in a blog post, the YouTube team noted that nearly one out of every two people on the internet visited the  website, which has grown into a global hit since launching in 2005.

"If YouTube were a country, we'd be the third largest in the world after China and India," the team said.

"PSY and Madonna would have to repeat their Madison Square Garden performance in front of a packed house 200,000 more times. That's a lot of Gangnam Style," the company said in a reference to the South Korean rapper and American pop singer.

Google bought YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 billion and has yet to disclose whether the service had returned a profit.

YouTube has gradually added professional content, such as full-length television shows and movies to its vast collection videos in a bid to attract advertisers.

Early this year, YouTube said its evolution may include subscriptions to content that creators expected people to watch on payment.

AFP quoted a YouTube spokesman as saying that it had long maintained that different content required different types of payment models.

 He added there were a lot of its content creators that thought they would benefit from subscriptions, so it was looking at that.