How big can YouTube get?

YouTube celebrates its 6th birthday today. Yes, it’s just 6 years since the video-sharing site made its first appearance in beta form, and almost immediately redefined the potential of the Internet as an entertainment medium.

To mark the anniversary, the YouTube blog today highlighted a couple of mind-boggling statistics that show just how big a phenomenon the site has become:

• More than 48 hours of video are uploaded to the site every minute. That’s four months worth of video every hour and eight years of video every day! Video uploads have increased 37 percent increase over the last six months and 100 percent over the last year.

• Just this past weekend, YouTube reached the 3 billion views per day mark. That’s the equivalent of nearly half the world’s population watching a YouTube video each day, or every U.S. resident watching at least nine videos a day. Again, that’s a 50 percent increase in views per day in just 12 months.

Even if some of the last year’s startling growth can be attributed to YouTube increasing the length of allowable videos, these extraordinary stats still beg the question of just how big YouTube can become. If it’s still experiencing growth rates of 50 percent or more in its sixth year, are there any limits to its ultimate popularity, other than the overall population of the planet and the availability of video cameras and smartphones?

YouTube doesn’t offer any predictions, saying only that YouTube is successful “because it’s a reflection of you and your world. If this is what we’ve accomplished together in the last six years, we can only imagine where you’ll take us in the next six!”