Google's CEO reminded investors that YouTube users watch more video than Facebook users

Sundar Pichai

(Flickr/Maurizio Pesce)

Google just fired back at Facebook in the increasingly heated video battle the two companies are waging.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai said on Monday that viewers of Google-owned YouTube watch hundreds of millions of hours of video every day.

That's hundreds, plural.

And it's basically Pichai's way of reminding investors that YouTube's audience watches far more video that Facebook users watch on the social network.

Facebook has been ramping up its video effort, with more than 8 billion daily video views on its service. Much of these video views are autoplay videos, which Facebook counts as a view if the video plays in a user's feed for more than three seconds.

Last week Facebook revealed for the first time the total hours of video watched every day: 100 million hours a day.

That's an impressive number, but it's still well short of YouTube.

Of course, Pichai didn't specify how many hundreds of millions of hours of daily video viewing it has. But previous reports suggest it is quite a bit.

The New York Times reported in December 2014 that people watched more than 300 million hours of videos on YouTube every day. Then, a person familiar with YouTube's numbers told Business Insider that watch time had swelled past 500 million hours a day in July. YouTube has also said that its watchtime has been growing 60% year-over-year.

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