YouTube has announced that on its fifth birthday it has managed to hit the altogether very impressive figure of two billion views a day.

Strange to think YouTube didn't exist until five years ago...

The announcement was made via the service’s blog, which goes into some detail on the journey YouTube has made, from its startup days to its current incarnation as a part of the day-to-day browsing habits of a significant portion of all web users. As the blog post itself points out, that two billion views figure is fairly impressive in terms of the content being served, especially if you take into consideration the fact that the figure is “nearly double the prime-time audience of all three major U.S. television networks combined.”

Of course, the folks at YouTube aren’t immediately comparing the service to the telly, noting the fundamental differences between the two and the fact that, on average, users spend around fifteen minutes a day on YouTube, but five hours watching TV.

If nothing else, this news is made only more interesting by the fact that, in October of 2009, an update to the official YouTube blog celebrated the fact that the service had managed to pass one billion views a day. Essentially, the point to take from that announcement, alongside this latest posting, is that YouTube took four and a half years to get to one billion views a day, but only six months or so to double that figure. It’s impressive stuff, especially when you consider the fact that the service hosts so very much user-generated content.

Of course, the number of views per day is likely very well bolstered by services like YouTube DISCO, which many will no doubt have been using as a web-based music service since Spotify’s pull away from Ireland.