Facebook video is big and it’s getting bigger. For the first time,
YouTube really needs to worry about losing its position as the king of
online video.
Facebook video, which is relatively young in comparison to YouTube
which launched in 2005, is now delivering 4 billion daily viewers.
That’s up from 3 billion views every day, which was announced in January
2015. Facebook has had the ability to upload video for a number of
years, but didn’t get serious about it until 2014 when it adjusted its algorithms to weight video more heavily.
By contrast, YouTube reached the 4 billion video views daily mark in 2012, about eight months after it had reached the 3 billion mark and seven years after it launched.
YouTube should be scared of Facebook. It’s building a video powerhouse that Google may struggle to match, because it hasn’t managed to successfully build out a social graph like that of Facebook.
It’s only a matter of time until there are people that are dedicated
“Faceviders” just like there are fanatical “YouTubers” who regularly
upload videos to YouTube of their lives, or topics that are interesting
to them.
Perhaps the days of being a YouTuber are numbered.
There’s a number of reasons to give your original videos straight to Facebook. First, it gives you almost guaranteed exposure right now. Add a video to a public post and the Newsfeed algorithm will shine in your favor and show it to a significant amount more people than any other type of post (like a photo or text-only update).
Take, for example, this video
shared by Vox on Facebook. The page itself has 225,000 likes, but the
video received over 1.1 million views since when it was shared on April
10. By contrast, the same video shared on YouTube has only received 85,000 views. That’s a serious amount of reach.
Facebook’s social graph is a potent advantage over YouTube. Videos
come straight to the users, in their Newsfeed, where they’re already
spending most of their time on the service. They don’t have to leave
Facebook’s walled garden to find content.
Google Plus, which is deeply integrated into YouTube, can’t possibly
hope to ever have that kind of reach. People don’t sit on Google Plus
refreshing their feeds all day to find out what their friends are up to,
they do it on Facebook.
There is a big risk for those adopting Facebook as their primary
place for sharing video, namely the Newsfeed algorithm. With YouTube,
you upload your video and it’s there for the world to see. Those
subscribed will get notified and getting the word out to others is up to
you.
On Facebook, the algorithm can drive huge traffic to your content,
but it also could eventually fade to a pittance as the site becomes
saturated with content.
The opportunity for videos to travel further than your own reach –
like in the Vox example – is likely worth the risk. The big unknown is
how long Facebook will stick with its current algorithm. There’s always
the chance future changes will put some creators out in the cold. Just
ask Zynga about its horrible year in 2012.
Facebook doesn’t have any way for creators to monetize videos right
now, but when it finally delivers that, early adopters will win big.
Very soon you might just look to Facebook for those funny cat videos
before you even think of YouTube, which is the first time a competitor
has posed such a sizable threat to Google’s service. It’s unclear what
Google will do to win those users back, as Facebook continues to quietly
steal them away.
credit to http://thenextweb.com/opinion/2015/04/23/facebook-video-is-on-course-to-steal-youtubes-video-sharing-crown/
No comments :
Post a Comment