If you’ve been on Facebook lately, you might notice that most of what you see in your News Feed is now videos. In April, Facebook recorded about 4 billion video views daily. Now the figure is double. The company says it now records 8 billion views daily and this is estimated to be from 500 million of its 1.55 billion users. The younger population filled Snapchat also recorded 4 billion views in September of this year. Well in the same report, it was reported that Facebook considers a video viewed just after 3 seconds as opposed to YouTube’s 30 seconds. Interestingly, just when we thought this might discourage advertisers, Facebook continues to post a strong revenue. It is reported that Facebook now generates 760 years worth of video on each day. Well to emphasise that, there are 8760 hours in a year. You do the math and you see the staggering amount of videos generated on Facebook. Facebook sees a big opportunity here in the sense that it can now share in the huge TV adverts revenue.
I now hear that Facebook is now thinking of the YouTube styled revenue sharing with content creators. This would ultimately encourage more people to create content for Facebook even as YouTube has launched deeper into ad free paid subscription services recently. YouTube recently partnered with content creators for original content in order to now compete against Netflix, Amazon and Apple TV.
This new trend puts Facebook directly in competition with YouTube. See our piece on that here.
My take
Facebook now has over about 50% of the entire internet population on its platform and this presents a unique opportunity to Facebook. The 8 billion figure was recorded from just 1 third of its users. This dismisses the notion that Facebook is still in the back seat when it comes to videos. One feature I must add that has really helped Facebook videos is its “Save” feature where you can save videos and articles for another time.
Paul Balo is the founder of TechBooky and a highly skilled wireless communications professional with a strong background in cloud computing, offering extensive experience in designing, implementing, and managing wireless communication systems.
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It is reported that Facebook now generates 760 years worth of video on each day. Well to emphasise that, there are 8760 hours in a year. You do the math and you see the staggering amount of videos generated on Facebook. Facebook sees a big opportunity here in the sense that it can now share in the huge TV adverts revenue.
