Unlike YouTube’s 5th year celebration when it created a special website with messages from prominent figures such as Conan O’Brien, this year’s anniversary is more muffled and subdued. Youtube only came up with a blog announcing the website’s dramatic increase in size.

According to YouTube’s blog post, its users now upload an average of 48 hours of video per minute. The figure’s up by 37 percent in the last 6 months and a double from last year. Thanks to the site’s upgrades making it easier for YouTube users to upload, and for accepting lengthier videos. YouTube rakes 3 billion views a day which is also double from the previous year. The growth rate declined though, as it folded its views from a billion to two in just 6 months last year. Still, it’s a pretty dramatic growth pattern, and to get better grasp of how histrionic YouTube’s success is, it only had 2.5 million videos viewed a month when it first became a hit back in 2005. The first video uploaded on YouTube was that of its co-founder Jared Karim.

According to a report by Nielsen, YouTube is one of the top 10 most visited sites in the US as of April 2011, and among these 10, it’s the only one getting an increase of month-over-month unique visitors. It appealed on 106.4 million people from 94 million, up by 1.1 percent. It’s also got an increase average time of view per person.

Incontestably, YouTube is one of Google’s strongest weapons, and it’s a front liner in conquering the online video arena as its market explodes. Google also decided to make YouTube a movie rental site, adding some 3,000 titles to its array. It’s going to go head on against Netflix, Amazon and similar other movie rental hubs.

“Movies are available to rent at industry-standard pricing, and can be watched with your YouTube account on any computer. The new titles will begin appearing later today and over the coming weeks,” said YouTube product marketing manager Camille Yearst in a blog post yesterday.

While YouTube’s busy doing its thing, Netflix continues to focus on online video, even spicing up their website by adding hit TV shows. Also, Netflix is dropping its DVD rental-by-mail service. I mean, seriously, it’s about time. “Our focus is really on streaming at this point,” said CEO Reed Hastings. While Netflix cares for quality movies on their service, Fox Home Entertainment’s President Mike Dunn doesn’t think it’s a good idea to show something as high-end as Avatar 3D on something like Netflix which is an eat-all-you-can service.