YouTube is celebrating its 6th birthday, and has announced that it has exceeded over 48 hours worth of video being uploaded every minute, which is a 100% increase year-over-year). Pretty amazing.

“In just six years, YouTube has become a comprehensive broadcast platform for content creators large and small and distributed across over 350 million devices,” a YouTube rep told WebProNews in an email. “YouTube isn’t and will never be about one type of device or one type of video. It’s about all video: user generated, made for Web and traditional made for broadcast.”

The increase has been driven by more live streaming events, longer upload times, and faster upload processing times, the rep says. It will be interesting to see how much the number grows in another year, as the live thing has really only recently been kickstarted, and they’re now renting movies, including new releases.

The increase in usage of tablets and connected TV devices should only fuel continued growth for the site as well.

YouTube also announced that global daily views have exceeded 3 billion (a 50% year-over-year increase). Also very impressive. “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,” the company says.

“Thanks to YouTube, today a geometry teacher in Cambridge, MA can teach an interested student in Cambodia, a talented eleven-year-old Canadian vocalist has the world as her audience, and a citizen living in a disaster-ravaged country can document and raise awareness to the plight of her nation,” the YouTube rep says. “It’s been a great six years at YouTube, and we look forward to continuing to serve as the destination for the broadest, most diverse and rich platform of video on Earth.”

The company also revealed this week that it is offering a new kind of pre-roll ad to its partners, which will play a commercial on the first view of all YouTube partner videos (non-user-generated content) each day.

Site-owners, webmasters, and marketers, don’t forget YouTube is also 2nd largest search engine.