By Angela Moscaritolo
May 21, 2012 10:48am EST
www.pcmag.com
Happy seventh birthday, YouTube! The popular Google-owned video-sharing Web site celebrated its seventh birthday on Sunday, and reached another video upload milestone.
"We're so honored that you've used YouTube to share how-to tips, political moments, home videos, comedy, music, and so much more," the YouTube team wrote in a Sunday blog post.
And over the past seven years, the site has grown leaps and bounds. Case in point — Internet users now download a staggering 72 hours of video to the site every minute. Yes, you read that correctly. In other words, every single minute, users download three days worth of video to YouTube. Just a year ago, users were downloading 42 hours of video a minute.
"That's 61 Royal Wedding Ceremonies, 841 Bad Romances, and 1,194 Nyan Cats" every single minute, the YouTube team pointed out.
Over the past year, YouTube has redesigned the site, and worked to expand its original programming, launching dozens of new content channels through tie-ups with major publishers, movie stars, comedians, sports associations, and more. YouTube also added the option to convert all short-form videos uploaded in 1080p to 3D.
"And all 800 million of you all over the world have shown us we're on the right track by increasing subscriptions 50 percent and watching over 3 billion hours a month," the YouTube team wrote.
Meanwhile, the site also garnered a bit of controversy earlier this month after erroneously removing a video of Sports Illustrated cover model Kate Upton dancing provocatively. YouTube apologized for the error and reinstated the video.
Late last month, a German also court ordered Google to install filtering software on YouTube in the country to prevent users from uploading copyrighted material.
For more from Angela, follow her on Twitter @amoscaritolo.