YouTube views hit 1bn mark

Washington - The number of video views a day on YouTube has surpassed one billion, the co-founder of the wildly popular video-sharing site said Friday on the third anniversary of its acquisition by Google.

"I'm proud to say that we have been serving well over a billion views a day on YouTube," YouTube chief executive Chad Hurley said in a blog post. "This is great moment in our short history."

Hurley noted that YouTube, which Google bought for $1.65bn, has evolved from a site dominated by user-generated content to a platform for more professional material.

"We wanted to create a place where anyone with a video camera, a computer, and an internet connection could share their life, art, and voice with the world, and in many cases make a living from doing so," he said.

"Three years after the acquisition, our platform and our business continue to grow and evolve," Hurley said.

"We are still committed to the same principles that informed the site early on, but we know things have changed," he said.

"As we've started to see demand for longer, full-length content, we've brought more shows and movies to the site."

YouTube has been negotiating deals with movie studios and others in a bid to offer more content attractive to advertisers.

It announced on Thursday, for example, that the 1976 Martin Scorsese film "Taxi Driver" starring Robert De Niro and Jodie Foster is currently available for US viewers on YouTube's Crackle channel.

YouTube has yet to make money but Google executives have said recently that it is getting closer to becoming profitable.

- AFP