Happy Anniversary, YouTube Celebrates 1 Billion Views A Day

If there was any doubt that YouTube was the undisputed king of online video, those questions can be erased.

YouTube is celebrating the third anniversary of its purchase by Google (NSDQ:GOOG) by revealing that it is serving over 1 billion views a day. The online video sharing site was acquired by Google on Oct. 10, 2006, for $1.65 billion.

"Today, I'm proud to say that we have been serving well over a billion views a day on YouTube. This is great moment in our short history and we owe it all to you," Chad Hurley, CEO and co-founder of YouTube, wrote on the official blog.

Hurley believes that the success of YouTube is mostly based on the basic principles that were used to launch the site and which the video sharing service has stuck to for the past three years, but with an eye toward the future as well.

According to Hurley, YouTube owes a large part of its success to following the basic tenets it was founded on: quick load times, open platforms and a "clip culture." Those fundamentals, Hurley believes, have now become staples of online video.

And YouTube, even with over 1 billion views a day, plans to stick to those guns while innovating for the future.

"Three years after the acquisition, our platform and our business continue to grow and evolve. We are still committed to the same principles that informed the site early on, but we know things have changed. As bandwidth has increased, so has our video quality. As we've started to see demand for longer, full-length content, we've brought more shows and movies to the site," Hurley wrote.