How many hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute?

YouTube announced most of these milestones on its blog and listed them on a press timeline. The dates below are when the number was published or when an archived press page showed it. They are not the day the threshold was crossed, which YouTube rarely stated.

Between 2007 and 2012 a new figure came every few months; the two press-page figures after that are a year apart. After the 100 on the January 2014 press page, the next official number we found is over 500 hours, in a Google blog post from October 2019.^[11] Other figures for the years in between circulate online. We left them out because we couldn't trace them to YouTube with a date. YouTube also mentioned an eight-hour stage between six and ten, without a month.^[3]

The sum is short. Multiply the hours per minute by 1,440, the minutes in a day, to get the hours uploaded in one day. Divide by 8,766, the hours in an average year of 365.25 days. That gives the years one person would need to watch it all at normal speed, without sleeping, if the rate stayed the same.

In 2007, six hours a minute meant 8,640 hours a day: almost exactly one year of watching. At 500 hours a minute a day of uploads takes 82.1 years. The World Health Organization put global life expectancy at birth at 71.4 years in 2021.^[16] Someone watching eight hours a day, like a full-time job, would need about 246 years.

YouTube did this kind of sum itself. In March 2010 it called 24 hours a minute a day's worth of content uploaded to YouTube every minute.^[5] In November 2010 it worked out 35 hours a minute as 50,400 hours uploaded to YouTube every day.^[6] In January 2012, at 60 hours a minute, it told uploaders: you're uploading one hour of video to YouTube every second.^[8]

In our December 2011 capture the figure is the first line under Traffic on YouTube's press statistics page, part of the Press Room that the homepage footer linked as Press & Blogs in our June 2011 capture. It reads 48 hours of video are uploaded every minute, resulting in nearly 8 years of content uploaded every day. Our formula gives 7.9 years for 48 hours a minute, the same answer.

YouTube press statistics · 2011-12-06

The lines under it count in other units. Over 3 billion videos are viewed a day, and Users upload the equivalent of 240,000 full-length films every week. By May 2013 the page had a new design and a new order. Under Viewership the upload rate is third: 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. Above it come More than 1 billion unique users visit YouTube each month and Over 4 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube.

YouTube press statistics · 2013-05-11

The 500 is older than it looks in 2026. Susan Wojcicki, then YouTube's CEO, used it in her February 2020 post for YouTube's 15th birthday.^[12] A Google blog post had already said over 500 hours in October 2019.^[11] YouTube's blog repeated more than 500 in 2021 and over 500 in 2023,^[13][14] and the March 2026 testimony to Parliament says 500.^[1]

We found no higher official figure in YouTube's or Google's publications up to October 7, 2026, which doesn't prove that none exists. Over 500 is a floor, so the real number may well be higher. YouTube's current press page counts in videos instead: On average, there are over 20 million videos uploaded daily to YouTube.^[15] That figure can't be turned into hours without knowing the average length of those videos, and YouTube doesn't give one.