RT hits a billion views on YouTube

Russia’s international news Channel RT reports that its YouTube channel has become the first television news channel ever to reach the one billion views mark.

RT’s editor in chief Margarita Simonyan said she was thrilled with the result and that setting such a benchmark in online video performance confirms RT’s status as the top news content provider on the world’s largest video-sharing platform.

“A billion hits – that’s a stunning result. From RT’s very first days we knew that in the nearest future the battle for viewers will be taking place on the Internet, on new platforms. This is why we are especially proud and happy to be the first. This is an amazing achievement for a Russian news channel – to become a major provider of news in the space that reaches the most important, young audience.”

“RT, the Russian TV channel, is YouTube’s largest ‘news’ partner in the world,” said Danielle Tiedt, YouTube’s VP of marketing. “Very few of our partners can boast a billion video views, and RT will be the first news channel to get to this number. RT was one of the first channels to come to YouTube, back in 2007, and to create video content aimed specifically at ‘generation C’ – the kind of content that our users gladly watch and share.”