YouTube has announced that it’s hit a fairly impressive milestone this week, managing to hit fully 24 hours of video uploaded to the service every minute, up from 20 hours in May of last year.

YouTube has become startlingly grim...

It might not seem like all too impressive a statistic in terms of growth, but given that it’s an extra four hours every minute, there’s not an awful lot to compare it to; the sheer amount of content (regardless of whether or not anyone watches it) is pretty staggering. The folks from YouTube put together a fairly impressive list of things that happen inside the 24 hours that people might be able to compare it to… so, in terms of content updated to YouTube, one minute is the time that:

“The earth rotates 360 degrees as it orbits the sun
The second hand on your bedside clock ticks 86,400 times
The most skilled climber reaches Mount Everest’s summit
2.5 days go by on Jupiter”

It’s certainly interesting stuff, but we’d imagine that the one statistic that they don’t want to flaunt here is the really grim one. Indeed, the fact that there are 24 hours in a day only makes this easier to calculate now. If we take the average human lifespan to be a very generous eighty years, then a little simply mathematics tells us something really revealing about the amount of content on YouTube.

“If you were to do nothing but watch YouTube for an entire human life, you’d only fit in about 20 and a third days of YouTube uploads.”

Not sure about anyone else, but that’s a little bit terrifying.