YouTube is trialing a new service called ‘Topics on Search’, giving viewers examples of related searches.
The tool, available on the video sharing site’s beta testing area ‘TestTube’, uses an algorithm that looks at video tags, comments, shares, viewing patters, and other signals.
YouTube is hoping to keep viewers on the site by providing videos on topics that they might be interested in seeing.
Topics also can work in combination with their original search to help find the exact video they’re looking for.
The typical YouTube user spends 15 minutes a day watching YouTube content, according to BBC. The more videos they watch, the more ads they are likely to see, driving revenue for parent company Google.
35 hours of video is uploaded every minute
YouTube also announced that more than 35 hours of video is uploaded every minute on the video-sharing site. That’s 2,100 hours per hour, or 50,400 hours of new videos per day.
“You’ve increased the amount of video uploaded to YouTube to 35 hours per minute. That breaks out to 2,100 hours uploaded every 60 minutes, or 50,400 hours uploaded to YouTube every day,” Hunter Walk, Director of product management at YouTube, announced.
“If we were to measure that in movie terms (assuming the average Hollywood film is around 120 minutes long), 35 hours a minute is the equivalent of over 176,000 full-length Hollywood releases every week,” he explained.
YouTube provided a chart showing how much video content users have been uploading over time. The amount has grown steadily over the past few years and seems to be accelerating.
Users were uploading about 10 hours of video every minute at the end of 2007 and about half as much as they are now two years ago.
YouTube says there are several factors that have contributed to the growth. This year, YouTube increased the time limit for videos from 10 minutes to 15 minutes. While this happened only recently, it was a factor.
The file size limit was also increased to a generous 2 GB, which should be enough even for HD video. Though, with 4K and 2K videos supported now, this may prove insufficient as well.
There were some contributing factors out of YouTube’s control as well. Mobile usage is on the rise and more phones enable users to directly upload videos to the site. The site says that the API is also seeing increased usage.
Read the full YouTube blog here.
Watch a video demonstration of the tool in action here:
