Today is YouTube's eighth birthday, and to mark the occasion Google is revealing new statistics that underline what a cultural sensation its video site has become. Most staggeringly, over 100 hours of video are now uploaded to YouTube each and every minute. One year ago on this day, that figure stood at 72 hours per minute (it was 48 hours in 2011). So aside from record-breaking viewership — over one billion people now visit YouTube monthly — more and more users are continuing to upload their own clips to the site in hopes of creating the next viral phenomenon. YouTube has highlighted some of those memorable videos in its celebratory post, though at this point the greater challenge may be finding one you haven't already seen.

On May 18th, 2012, Facebook went public at a per-share price of $38. The company experienced a brief gain, spiking into the 40s, but ended its first day of trading just a few cents above the set $38 price. The following days saw the stock decline, under its listing price. The stock would fall as low as $17.55 before it began a period of recovery. As Facebook has grown its income from mobile users, and proven that its desktop market share isn’t transitory, investors have warmed to its shares. Facebook has since recovered from its lows, and is now closing its first year as a public company at $26.25. That’s a 30.9 percent decline from its IPO price, but is up essentially 50% from its historic, 52 week low. Facebook investors that bought the company when it was mired in the doldrums have done well. Folks who bought on day one have endured nothing but decline, of varying degrees, since their purchase.

YouTube announced this week that it is going to roll out its new channel design to all of its publishers at the beginning of June. All channels that still use the previous design will automatically be converted on June 5 — but the new channels are just the first step towards a bigger goal of unifying YouTube’s design across all platforms. YouTube Senior UX Designer Josh Sassoon and his colleague Tom Broxton, who leads the Monetization UX team at YouTube, gave a sneak peek at the multi-screen design principles that will guide YouTube’s future looks during a session at Google’s I/O developer conference in San Francisco Thursday. The big theme was eerily familiar to anyone following our I/O coverage this week: YouTube wants to unify its experience across all screens, the duo explained, while paying attention to the specific use cases for each and every screen.

The Yahoo board has approved a massive $1.1 billion all-cash deal to buy Tumblr. It’s not clear when the official vote was taken, but sources close to the board said the acquisition was a foregone conclusion and was unanimously approved by the directors of Silicon Valley Internet giant. The deal will likely be announced Monday morning, said numerous sources. AllThingsD.com initially broke the story of the acquisition efforts and later followed up with details of the exact price and the board meeting to approve the transaction. There were no other competing bids, despite reports, to snap up the New York-based social blogging service. That said, Tumblr had held some very preliminary discussions about various deals with Facebook, Google, Microsoft and also Twitter earlier this year.

Tuesday morning, TorrentFreak received an email from a UK music industry source which clearly indicated that the labels. led by the BPI, still view website censorship as the way forward in the continuing piracy battle. A total of 25 sites are listed including some of the world’s largest torrents sites – 1337x, Bitsnoop, ExtraTorrent, isoHunt, Monova, TorrentCrazy, TorrentDownloads, TorrentHound, TorrentReactor and Torrentz. In fact, if the current action comes to fruition, only one of the current top 10 torrent sites will remain unblocked in the UK. However, in the torrent scene news travels very quickly indeed and if there is one thing users hate more than a badly-seeded torrent, it’s censorship, and the signs are that the proposed blocks will be met head on with potent circumvention tools.

Grooveshark’s lengthy legal battle with several of the world’s major recording labels, who accused the popular music streaming service of mass-copyright infringement, may soon come to an end. Several of the company’s (former) employees have agreed to a “consent judgment” which prohibits them from infringing the major labels’ copyrights or working with similar services in future. No settlement has been reached with the parent company yet, but the recent developments cast doubt over Grooveshark’s future.

How was Google able to secure deals for All Access, which was unveiled at Google I/O on Wednesday, while Apple has been stymied? For starters, Google chose to offer a standard subscription music service very similar to those built by Spotify and Rdio, and that meant the terms had largely been established, according to multiple sources close to the talks. Apple, on the other hand, is pioneering a hybrid web and radio service — one that resembles Pandora but melds it with some on-demand features, the sources said. The licensing agreement had to be created from scratch.

Dhingana is stepping up its efforts to monetize its streaming service for Indian music after it introduced video-roll advertising, initially for its iOS app only. The company — which has offices in Pune, India, and Sunnyvale, California – launched its advertising platform in August 2012 and it also offer a paid-for subscription for those who prefer an ad-free experience. The company says that its new ‘Premium Video Advertising’ feature is targeted at brands looking to reach its music-loving users with “TV quality commercials”.

What is this highly publicized battle between GEMA and Germany's nightclubs really about? How did a conflict about music licensing fees become an existential threat to large swathes of German nightlife? What the hell is GEMA, anyway? Even if you live in Germany and you know all about GEMA, you might have been surprised at the intensity of the anti-GEMA protest movement as it coalesced over the summer of 2012. Nobody took to the streets when similar changes in fee structure were introduced for live concerts a year ago. And there was only a mild media buzz two years ago when clubs across Berlin ran into trouble with Berlin's tax authorities. What made the GEMA-Tarifreform such an emotional issue? Throughout 2012 and early 2013, there was a lot of confusion, distortion, misinformation and partisan rhetoric surrounding GEMA and its new licensing fees. And so, it seems like the time is right to look back and set the record straight.

Google held a session today at I/O 2013 about how to make money on Android, and in the initial few minutes it shared some updated stats around Google Play revenues and how those are progressing. Not surprisingly, the big growth is coming with in-app purchases, though Google’s recently launched subscription model is also making headway. Google said that its in-app revenues through Play are up 700 percent since the same time last year, which is reflected in the top apps as listed by highest grossing titles in the Play rankings. Subscriptions, which just launched around 12 months ago, is also making headway, doubling inbound revenue each quarter according to Google. Some apps which use subscription as their exclusive revenue model are now cracking the top grossing list, like Pandora.