YouTube serves up a billion videos a day

The popularity of online video-sharing site YouTube has been confirmed by the news that it now serves up a billion video views every day.

The site, which was acquired by Google in 2006 for $1.65bn (883m at the 2006 exchange rate), still sticks to its original ethos of providing a platform for surfers around the world to share their own home-made content.

"I'm proud to say that we have been serving well over a billion views a day on YouTube. This is great moment in our short history and we owe it all to you," said Chad Hurley, chief executive and co-founder of YouTube.

"We are still committed to the same principles that informed the site early on, but we know things have changed. As bandwidth has increased, so has our video quality. As we've started to see demand for longer, full-length content, we've brought more shows and movies to the site," continued Hurley.

Recently, innovations such as an interface for TVs called YouTube XL and 3D videos have been introduced to the site.

However, there are some down sides to YouTube's popularity. Earlier this week, security firm Kaspersky Labs reported that the site was being used by spammers to host unsolicited adverts.