YouTube users’ number breaks 1bn monthly record

Google's video hosting service announced Wednesday that for the first time, it's driving these colossal numbers - more than a billion unique users on the site, every month, Cnet.com reported/

"If YouTube were a country, we'd be the third largest in the world after China and India," YouTube wrote in a blog post today. "Our monthly viewership is the equivalent of roughly 10 Super Bowl audiences."

While Google hadn't released YouTube's latest unique visitor numbers in January, it did say that people were watching a total of 4 billion hours of YouTube per month. Psy's "Gangnam Style" music video is said to have definitely hit the charts. In December, Google announced that the wildly popular video was the first clip to ever surge past 1 billion views. And, in March, kids' show "Sesame Street" announced that it topped 1 billion YouTube views.

A lot of what's powering this growth is the new generation of multiscreen viewers, or what market research firm Nielsen calls "Generation C." According to new numbers by the firm, the number of Generation C viewers who watch YouTube on their smartphones is now equal to those who tune in on their PCs.

"The way people consume content is changing. For the first time, an entire generation has grown up watching content on their own terms," Google's advertising research director Gunnard Johnson wrote in a blog post today. "This generation is defined by the Internet, mobile, and social - consuming content when and where they want."