Consumption of news and politics videos on YouTube increased by over 500 percent last year, according to Olivia Ma, News Specialist. Olivia made these comments at the YouTube news media conference in Washington last Monday.  Surely the Olympics and the presidential campaign were key drivers.  The Associated Press, the world's largest media organization, has been one of the big parts of YouTube growth in the news area.

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The AP had 77 million video views on its YouTube channel last year.

At the conference, I spoke with Bill Burke, the Global Director of Online Video Products for the AP.  He spoke about the value of being on YouTube.  He discussed  the expansion of the AP Online Video Network, a service which provides online video to member newspapers around the globe.  The AP will be covering the Inauguration tomorrow with 6 hours of live video coverage which will be distributed to hundreds of newspaper and broadcast partners around the world.

— Andy Plesser, Executive Producer