YouTube today announced that users are now uploading 35 hours of video to the site every minute:

That breaks out to 2,100 hours uploaded every 60 minutes, or 50,400 hours uploaded to YouTube every day. If we were to measure that in movie terms (assuming the average Hollywood film is around 120 minutes long), 35 hours a minute is the equivalent of over 176,000 full-length Hollywood releases every week.

Another way to think about it is: if three of the major US networks were broadcasting 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year for the last 60 years, they still wouldn’t have broadcast as much content as is uploaded to YouTube every 30 days.

And if you lined all those videos end-to-end, they would probably stretch to the moon and back three times.

YouTube attributes the growth to four things:

• They increased the time limit for videos uploaded by users by 50%, from 10 to 15 minutes.
• The upload file size increased over the last few years by more than 10x to 2GB.
• Mobile phones have improved dramatically in how quickly and easily they upload videos.
• Companies are adding “Upload to YouTube” features to their apps.

User-generated media continues to grow at an amazing rate, making the need for sites and tools that let you filter through this mass of media more important than ever.