YouTube reaches billion users milestone

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.

“If YouTube were a country, we’d be the third largest in the world after China and India,” YouTube said in a blogpost announcing that it now has a billion unique visitors every month. “Nearly one out of every two people on the internet visits YouTube.” However, the huge user numbers raise questions about the costs of serving bandwidth-intensive video to so many users and whether the eight-year-old site can generate a profit for Google – and its content partners.