YouTube by the numbers at Google I/O

SAN FRANCISCO -- Everybody knows that YouTube is growing, but Google revealed on Wednesday just how big it's gotten.

Matt Frost, senior business product manager for the Chrome Web Media Team, listed these statistics at the Google I/O show for developers:

• More than 1 billion monthly users;

• More than 4 billion video views per day;

• More than 6 billion hours of video watched per month;

• More than 72 hours of video uploaded each minute

• And 25 percent of consumption is with mobile devices.

In addition, Frost said that HD video is "becoming dominant."

That's obviously a lot of video, and Google has to pay a lot of money to store and stream that. For that reason, it's developing the VP9 codec -- a royalty-free, open-source successor to the VP8 compression technology Google is pushing hard.

"With a codec as good as VP9, we can significantly increase the size of the Internet," Frost said. "We can significantly increase the speed of the Internet."