YouTube to increase workforce by 30 per cent as video dominates

In the past a lot of questions were asked about Google's purchase of YouTube – namely whether it would actually make any money from the deal.

Well, it seems as if the site is clearly proving a success after it announced it's looking to add almost 200 new members of staff in locations across the world in order to cope with its growth.

YouTube's human resources manager Jeff Ferguson wrote in a blog posting that the site's success in the past 12 months meant there was an increased need for new staff to come on board.

"2010 was a bang-up year. And in 2011, we plan to grow the number of people working at YouTube by more than 30 per cent, making it the largest hiring year in YouTube's history," he said.

The positions range from software engineering to legal and public policy roles in cities such as London, Paris, New York, St Petersburg and Sao Paulo.

The fact YouTube is in a position to expand so widely not only suggests the company itself is in good health, but backs up a lot of what key tech leaders have been saying around the rise of video as the dominant internet traffic type.

Network giant Cisco expects 90 per cent of traffic on the internet to be video by 2019 and with YouTube saying 35 hours of video is uploaded every minute and has over two billion views a day, it's not hard to see why.

The announcement comes on the same day that former internet giant AOL said it was shedding another 900 jobs in the US and India, one fifth of its workforce, underlining the changing of the guard that has occurred in the last 15 years or so.

AOL has struggled to remake itself as an online content portal in recent years, although it still had the finances to agree to a $315m purchase of The Huffington Post.

14 Mar 2011