YouTube now gets over a billion hits a day, according to a new video blog post by the founder of the website.

The king of online video sites is celebrating its third anniversary of its purchase by Google by revealing that it is serving over 1 billion views a day. The online video sharing site was acquired by Google on Oct. 10, 2006, for $1.65 billion.

Today, I'm proud to say that we have been serving well over a billion views a day on YouTube. This is great moment in our short history and we owe it all to you, Chad Hurley, CEO and co-founder of YouTube, wrote on the official blog.

Hurley co-founded the website in 2004 with Steve Chen and Jawed Karim. They met while employees at online pay service PayPal.

We wanted to create a place where anyone with a video camera, a computer, and an internet connection can share their life, art, and voice with the world, and in many cases they can make a living from doing so, Mr Hurley said, reflecting on YouTube's original aims.

Hurley said short, user-created clips are still voraciously consumed on YouTube, but added, As we've started to see demand for longer, full-length content, we've brought more shows and movies to the site.

Earlier in August, YouTube said it would add clips from Time Warner programming such as Gossip Girl and The Ellen DeGeneres Show.

The deal allowed Time Warner to set up individual channels and sell ads to accompany the clips, with YouTube taking a share of the revenue.