2012 has proven to be a huge year for YouTube. The video sharing site has already looked back on a year of ads, and created a rather brilliant tribute to the biggest viral videos of the year. Now the site is looking back on the big news stories of the year, and the large role that YouTube played in getting that information out.

The stats released by YouTube today show the site is becoming more and more important to the news cycle in America and around the world. To illustrate that, the site boasts that 7,000 hours of news-related content is uploaded to YouTube daily. All of that content provides differing opinions, angles and sources to help viewers form a more educated opinion of world events than if they were to just watch one or two regular news channels.

As for the big news events of the year, YouTube rightfully points to Hurricane Sandy as being the major event of the year. In fact, 39,000 videos were uploaded in the week during the storm and the Weather Channel used YouTube to continuously live stream coverage of the storm for more than 70 hours.

The only thing that could compete with Sandy were the presidential election, and it did not disappoint. YouTube reveals that videos tagged Obama or Romney were viewed over 2.7 billion times during the election cycle. The debates also drew 27 million views on YouTube.

Other notable stories in 2012 that received millions of views included the conflict in Syria, the Red Bull Stratos Jump, the landing of the Mars Rover, and the shooting death of Trayvon Martin.