It was three years ago today that Chad Hurley and Steve Chen sold YouTube to Google for $1.65 billion. It has celebrated that anniversary by revealing the site now gets over one billion views a day worldwide and talking a little about the future.
Three Years Ago Today
It seems like just yesterday that the co-founders of YouTube sold the site to Google. In fact, it was a full three years ago that Google decided to ante up $1.65 billion for the fledgling online video site.
We found out just yesterday that Google CEO Eric Schmidt thought that price tag was around $1 billion out, with the site actually worth more like $600 million. But Google wanted the site so badly it was willing to pay a premium for it.
We’ve Been Acquired
Chad Hurley, now CEO of YouTube under Google’s reign, took time out today to celebrate the three year anniversary. In a blog post which referenced the video above (which shows Hurley and Chen minutes after agreeing the acquisition) he spoke of the past, present, and future of YouTube.
One Billion Views A Day
He also announced that YouTube now serves up “well over a billion views a day,” a quite astounding figure that even outdoes most estimates. There are few sites on the Web with these sorts of numbers, and it’s amazing that YouTube is now one of them.
YouTube now carries a new logo (as above) celebrating the one billion views a day. As Mashable points out, that figure equates to “at least 11,574 views per second, 694,444 views per minute, and 41,666,667 views per hour.”
Which shows why Google needed to get involved in the first place because it’s one of the few companies that could handle delivering that amount of data.
Revenue Vs. Viewers
There is, of course, one thing left out of these celebratory announcements, and that is any talk of revenue. Hurley and Chen are now focused on making YouTube as good a site as it possibly can be. But Google has to be more focused on turning it into a moneymaking business.
And that still isn’t yet the case, although Google has been making progress in clawing back some of its investment. Whether it’ll ever actually make its $1.65 billion back is another matter.
