YouTube has announced that one billion people are now regular users of the video-sharing website.

In a post on their official blog, YouTube said that the number of unique monthly users  had passed one billion.

“If YouTube were a country, we’d be the third largest in the world after China and India,” the triumphant post said.

YouTube is quickly catching up with Facebook which hit a billion users last month.

Launched in February 2005, a year after Facebook, YouTube quickly grew and by 2006, had already attracted an audience estimated at 50 million worldwide users a month. Shortly after Google stepped in and bought the company for what was then thought to be an over valued price of $1.65bn.

The Financial Times estimated that in 2012 YouTube generated $1.3bn in video advertising. Many hundreds of millions more are thought to be generated from search and banner advertising on the site,