The meteoric rise in traffic is due to the rise of social media and lucrative advertising by its parent company
YouTube has crossed the one billion threshold five months after rival social network Facebook said its online social network had reached that same figure.
Announcing the milestone on its blog, the recent growth in smartphones has been cited in helping to boost the numbers visiting the site every month.
The company said in a statement today: "Nearly one out of every two people on the Internet visits YouTube," adding that "if YouTube were a country, we’d be the third largest in the world after China and India."
