YouTube processing four billion video views a day

Video sharing service YouTube has revealed that users are now watching  four billion videos on the site every day, as the Google-owned service continues to grow in popularity.

The company said the milestone reflects a 25 per cent increase over May of 2011, when the site recorded three billion views per day.

YouTube said that, based on these figures, it estimates its service delivers enough content to stream a video to half of the world's population every day.

Additionally, the company reported a surge in uploads, reporting that its servers receive one hour of new content every second.

"Since the dawn of YouTube, we've been sharing the hours of video you upload every minute," the company said in a post to its official blog.

"In 2007, we started at six hours, then in 2010 we were at 24 hours, then 35, then 48 and now 60 hours of video every minute, an increase of more than 30 per cent in the past eight months."

The surge in activity has also brought new security and political concerns to the fore.

Events such as the Occupy protests and Indian censorship campaign have stirred up debate on what content YouTube and other social networking platforms should allow their users to share with the public.

The milestone comes as parent company Google is looking to integrate its YouTube service with its other web brands. The company recently unveiled a plan to feature YouTube alongside services such as Google+ and Gmail.