Building on the recent announcement that YouTube would add dozens of new channels with original content, Google has launched a significant redesign of YouTube that makes the site look and feel more like TV, with customizable channels.
In late October Google announced that YouTube would be expanding its original content with plans to launch some 96 new video channels over the next year from a variety of entertainment, sports and news partners.
"With our announcement last month that more of them [channels] are coming to YouTube, we want to make it easier for you to find and keep tabs of what you want to watch," Google posted on a blog announcing the redesign.
The blog also noted that "in July, we unveiled an experimental design called Cosmic Panda. We've used your feedback to improve our overall design, and today, we're presenting a cleaner and simpler YouTube, with a consistent gray background, bigger video thumbnails and a more streamlined watch page."
The redesign comes at a time when the site continues to see significant growth that Google hopes to turn into more engagement and additional ad revenues.
Google's YouTube currently gets over three billion views a day, up over 50% from a year ago, which is the equivalent of half the world's population watching a YouTube video each day, and attracts some 800 million unique visitors each month, according to data supplied to B&C by Google last week.
Mobile usage is also growing, with the site attracting some 400 million mobile views each day.
There are also about 48 hours of video uploaded to the site each minute, up 100% over the last year, for a total of about 7 year's worth of new video posted each day. Over the course of a month, more video is uploaded to YouTube than the video broadcast by the three major US networks in the last 60 years.
