WASHINGTON - YouTube gave its users five more minutes on Thursday, increasing the upload limit for videos to the site to 15 minutes from 10 minutes.

Joshua Siegel, a YouTube product manager, said in a blog post that increasing the time limit had been the "number one requested feature" by contributors to the wildly popular video-sharing site.

"We've heard you, and today we're pleased to announce that we've increased the upload limit to 15 minutes," he said.

Siegel said "ongoing technological efforts" had made it possible to increase the upload length.

Official YouTube partners have had the option for some time of posting videos longer than 10 minutes.

YouTube, which was bought by Google in 2006 for $1.65 billion, said in March that 24 hours worth of video are being uploaded to the video-sharing site every minute.

YouTube has been gradually adding professional content such as full-length television shows and movies to its vast trove of amateur video offerings in a bid to attract advertisers.