YouTube Goes Viral On Google, Hits Over 4B Views Per Day

With videographers uploading to YouTube at a rate of half-an-hour of imagery every second, one could easily say that YouTube has gone viral on itself. The Google image uploading service passed the 4B mark per day and is easily heading higher by the hour.

It's easy to see why YouTube has "gone viral" since it was purchased by Google in 2006. Just about every news outlet in the world encourages amateur videographers and would-be newspeople to upload any video they can get their hands on.

For example, just last summer during a major tornado outbreak in the middle US, video was being uploaded to YouTube at a ferocious rate. The rate was so quick that the "Weather Channel" was able to show what happened to a group of survivors of a direct tornado hit. The survivors had climbed into a cold storage locker in the rear of a building and then the lights went out.

With camera still rolling and mike still on the sounds and brief images that were recorded were beyond description. The number of downloads of that particular piece of video, once it hit YouTube were in the millions.

The same is true of another piece of weather-related videography as a cameraman stood at a window, seemingly transfixed as an EF-5 tornado came down on him and he had to be literally pulled away from the window by a friend. That video, which made it to YouTube, is still making its way around the world.

Google, owner of the hot video upload property, is never at a loss for self-promotion and declared that the number of video views is up by 25 percent in just 8 months. They further equated it to this saying the number of people watching YouTube upload were "the equivalent of more than half-the-world's population watching videos at one time. It's also the same number of $1 bills in circulation right now."

Some analysts are speculating that on the strength of its performance as a company, YouTube could be the single most profitable piece of the Google empire which has been building for some years.

Indeed, last year, Google added a service to YouTube which allows people to stream their video live to the service. Aptly called "Google Live", it has proven to be very popular. Some say the "Arab Spring," in which millions or people peacefully protested and rid themselves of dictators who have ruled through force of arms for 30 or 40 years, may have been the result of the instant upload service showing how troops were reacting to unarmed men and women.

There were videos, also, of who units which instantly changed sides to become insurgents when they saw what they were doing.

One other service, which was rumored to be in the offing as early as the spring was a 3D service for YouTube, but that still has not come about.