Google announced that its YouTube video site has hit a billion regular visitors, matching a similar milestone reached by Facebook last October, as mobile devices and global internet growth power web companies to unprecedented scale, teh Financial Times reports.
“If YouTube were a country, we’d be the third largest in the world after China and India,” YouTube said in a blogpost announcing on Wednesday evening that it now has a billion unique visitors every month. “Nearly one out of every two people on the internet visits YouTube.”
YouTube launched in February 2005, a year after Facebook, and in its early years was run from a small office above a fast-food restaurant in San Mateo, California. It provided a new way for anybody with a broadband connection to upload and distribute their video online, sparking a boom in user-generated content and what would become known as social media.
YouTube now receives the second-most search queries of any site in the world, behind only Google’s own search page, and is a challenger to Facebook as the world’s largest social network.
