Affirming that it’s not just your bleary eyes, atrophied limbs, and ravenous craving for likes and subscribes playing tricks on you, YouTube has confirmed that its daily viewership has now passed 1 billion hours worldwide. The news of this daily achievement (?) comes within a short window of the company’s announcement of its own cable-competing TV service.
For comparison, the planet Earth currently watches about 1.25 billion hours of television every day, usually before drifting off to sleep in an oil-and-carbohydrate drenched stupor of misery and regret. That number’s been steadily dwindling, though, while YouTube’s is on the rise; the 1 billion hours number—which translates to about 114 thousand years of uninterrupted viewing—is ten times higher than the one the company posted five years ago, and suggests that global couch potatoism may soon give rise to international bouts of Screen Eye and the dreaded “Compulsive Ad Skip Thumb.”