YouTube (News - Alert) turned five. And this 5-year-old has a lot of people coming to its party.

The Google subsidiary, which the search giant bought in late 2006 for $1.65 billion, now has more than 2 billion video views a day, according to a recent report. The same story reports that YouTube hit the 1 billion mark in October.

And, increasingly, it's not just amateur video on such subjects as cats playing piano that is drawing in droves of viewers. YouTube also now proffers a lot of commercial content, such as music and sports videos.

For example, among the No. 1 YouTube clips this year was a Lady Gaga music video for "Bad Romance."

This video comes from Vevo, a joint effort of three major American music labels that have partnered with Google to provide music videos containing advertisements. VEVO was created in partnership by Universal Music Group (News - Alert) (UMG), Sony Music Entertainment (SME) and the Abu Dhabi Media Company. The VEVO Network features the most extensive catalog of premium music content found anywhere on the Web thanks to deals with such leading music companies as Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, EMI Music, ABKCO, Big Machine Records, CBS Interactive Music Group, Concord Music Group, Hollywood Records, Lyric Street Records, Razor & Tie Entertainment, Walt Disney Records, Wind-up Records, Caroline Distribution, Fontana Distribution, INgrooves, IODA, RED and The Orchard (News - Alert), among many others.

Although YouTube isn't yet turning a profit, the business is increasing its revenue and ad space on the Google (News - Alert) subsidiary's home pages for 20 countries reportedly was sold out toward the end of last year. As a result, many now believe the company soon could move into the black.

That's a considerable improvement from just last year, when, as TMCnet reported, Credit Suisse analysts Spencer Wang and Ken Sena said that Google stood to  lose nearly half a billion dollars on YouTube. According to the same report, despite having a library of approximately 150 million to 160 million videos, many analysts estimated then that YouTube was only able to monetize about 3 percent of its video inventory.