Here’s a milestone you don’t see every day: YouTube announced this morning that it is serving more than a billion page views a day. That works out to 11,574 page views per second, and means that YouTube serves up a million page views about every 90 seconds. 

“This is great moment in our short history,” YouTube CEO and co-founder Chad Hurley wrote. What’s the broader significance? Hurley notes that “clip culture is here to stay,” and it’s a trend with huge ramifications for the Internet infrastructure industry. The Internet won’t replace the TV overnight, but entertainment consumption patterns are changing rapidly. As this shift accelerates, it will drive demand for more servers, storage, bandwith and content delivery technology to make it all work smoothly.

YouTube’s announcement also highlights the difficulty of estimating usage based on third-party estimates. Miguel Helft of the New York Times notes that ComScore only reently estimated that YouTube had 10 billion page views a month. 

Helft writes that Google may have an ulterior motive in sharing its in-house data. “For the last several months, Google, which typically says very little of substance about the numbers underlying its business, appears to have been trying to dispel the idea put forward by Wall Street analysts and some tech pundits that YouTube is a cash sinkhole,” he writes.