YouTube Hits One Billion Monthly Users

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Google has announced that its YouTube service now receives more than one billion visitors a month.

The phenomenal growth of the service has come in just eight years when the firm acquired the service for around $1 billion.

Announcing the milestone in a blog post, the firm called on advertisers to recognize the benefits the site can deliver.

"Tens of thousands of partners have created channels that have found and built businesses for passionate, engaged audiences. Advertisers have taken notice: a lot of top brands are now running campaigns on YouTube," the blog post said.

The firm also gave some examples of just how big this reach is now that it is hitting one billion users a month:

• Nearly one out of every two people on the Internet visits YouTube.
• Monthly viewership is the equivalent of roughly 10 Super Bowl audiences.
• If YouTube were a country, it would be the third largest in the world after China and India.

The firm said much of this growth was being driven by the rise of people using the site on smartphones, calling this new group of users Generation C, which stands for connected.

"The way people consume content is changing. For the first time, an entire generation has grown up watching content on their own terms," the post said.

"We found that the amount of time Gen C spends watching YouTube on their smartphones is up 74% from last year. In fact, in 2012 the number of Gen C viewers who regularly watch YouTube on smartphones caught up to the number of viewers tuning in on their PCs."

The announcement comes as the firm also unveiled a new note-keeping app called Keep.

This article was originally published on V3.