Facebook Passes YouTube For Number Of Desktop Video Views

The co-founder and executive chairman of digital analytics firm comScore, Gian Fulgoni, said in an interview with Beet.tv that Facebook has now passed YouTube for video views on desktop for the first time ever, delivering almost a billion more videos than YouTube in August.  Facebook’s recent video growth is certainly remarkable, however, on mobile, YouTube retained its lead.

Facebook’s auto-playing of videos definitely contributed to this growth, and an important question for marketers is whether or not this truly indicates useful engagement with users. “While there’s reach advantage for auto-play, there’s an issue as to whether you’re getting good engagement,” said Fulgoni. “You’re getting good engagement from user-initiated (video on YouTube) by definition. If you figure out how to create the video so it grabs people’s attention, you may have the benefits of high reach as well as engagement.”

This differentiation is essential to consider before determining the effect of Facebook’s rapid climb in video delivery on digital marketing strategies. However, there is no question that Facebook’s growth is impressive, and the analysis will certainly continue.

Facebook is still behind Google Sites for video views across total devices combined, according to the comScore Video Metrix. Regardless, there is no denying that Facebook’s video reach has grown remarkably over the past year. In September, the social media giant announced that it now gets a billion video views per day, with views increasing 50% from May through July in 2014. The massive increase is the result, as least in part, of the company’s adjustments to its newsfeed algorithm to serve up more relevant video content to those users that were more likely to watch a video. This summer, Facebook bought video ad tech firm LiveRail as part of its plans to monetize the massive numbers of views.

Some content companies are benefitting greatly from Facebook’s video success. Sean Mills, president of mobile/social news platform NowThisNews, spoke to Beet.tv about working with Facebook. “Our growth in monthly Facebook video views has increased by 30 times since July, and we’re seeing tens of millions of views on Facebook each month,” he said. “User engagement has also increased significantly and, in many ways, is the real indicator that we’re only seeing the beginning of the growth of quality video on Facebook. Through deep monitoring of Facebook data, we’ve learned a lot about what works in terms of story selection, scripting, formatting, frequency and timing of publishing across different categories of content.”