The people at YouTube are today citing some pretty mind boggling video upload metrics. We already understand there has been a 53% increase in online video usage. What is quite striking about these latest statistics is that the collective YouTube community are now uploading an astonishing 20 hours of video every minute of the day. That equates to a dazzling amount of user video upload, almost 4 years of footage every day!
YouTube are also implementing some quirky new features into the site in order to stimulate increased social networking activity between users. As illustrated below, this comes in the form of a system that allows you to post video comments to individual clips via your webcam.
Seemingly this explosive growth in bandwidth usage has been occurring since mid 2007. Back then the system reported a measly six hours of footage per minute. By January 2009, this had increased to a staggering 15 hours of footage every minute. That is the equivalent of all the Hollywood film studios producing in excess of 86,000 movies every week. OMG!

This exponential growth pattern is only likely to continue with the addition of these new social features within the site. Although we have witnessed video response functionality on YouTube in the past, the latest system gives users the ability to post a response using a single click, directly from the video itself. Now YouTube fanatics can post a response whenever they stumble across a YouTube embedded video anywhere on the web.
This explosive increase in traffic pays heavy testament to the size and strength of the entire YouTube community and its users. However, on a more serious note, Google (YouTube owners) have a serious task on their hands attempting to monetise its existing user base. These commercial obstacles are only exacerbated by the tremendous bandwidth costs that are necessary to support such incredible levels of traffic and popularity. These bandwidth costs are proving to be the largest challenge that YouTube face, with a reported forecast of $470 million in losses this year alone.
So whats the moral of the story? Well, essentially, as long as these statistics increase in conjunction with the growing popularity with the site, the associated costs will continue to grow in tandem. Its fine for YouTube to publicly celebrate the hallmark of budding film makers relinquishing over 20 hours of footage per minute on their servers. What they have neglected to express is their long term strategy to support the rising costs associated with increased use and bandwidth consumption. One has to speculate whether or not the high and mighty at Google have any idea the elements required to make this a successful and profitable business concern. Perhaps they are looking at an alternative advertising model or subscription service to support running costs, only time will tell…
If you have any ideas on how YouTube could potentially monetise their service, without annoying users, I would be really interested to hear your ideas.