Who doesn’t like YouTube? Not because of its cat videos, but just how it makes it easy to access a huge vault of just about every type of content.
YouTube has shared some insight on just how much people are watching it. According to the Google Alphabet owned company, people around the world are now watching over a billion hours of YouTube content every single day. YouTube reached this milestone late last year.
The numbers outpace its other competitors in the internet video space which include Facebook and content platforms like Netflix.
In a Wall Street Journal article that focused on YouTube’s latest numbers, execs from the company highlighted how the success was driven by the growth in content and artificial intelligence as represented by machine-learning algorithms help highlight content that a user will probably like.
As a Google subsidiary, YouTube benefits from the search engine’s algorithms that have a huge impression on what gets priority whenever people search for stuff online.
Then, of course, the flood of continuously uploaded content helps. According to the same report, 400 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube each minute which translates to 65 years of video a day.
These factors mean that it’s likely that everyone who looks for online video content will find a YouTube video first and there’ll be something that they like on the platform.
In Zimbabwe, YouTube is the second most frequented website (after the Google page) but consumption might not be as extensive. The high costs associated with broadband access make extended YouTube viewing an expensive hobby.
To reach a wider local audience content creators have had to rely on Facebook and WhatsApp which are both supported by data bundles.
However, they still use YouTube, not only because of its popularity with Zimbabweans in the diaspora but because, like the 1 billion + daily hours show, it’s clearly the default platform for accessing video on the internet.
