There’s no disputing that YouTube remains the king of online video, but the Google-owned property is starting to see some heavy competition from an unusual place: Facebook.
Whereas most videos shared on Facebook used to come in the form of embedded YouTube videos, most videos on the site today are now uploaded to the social network via Facebook’s video uploader. More to the point, 70% of all new videos posted to Facebook are being uploaded directly. Back in February of 2014, this figure was just 25%.
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Clearly, Facebook is fast becoming a video-centric site that YouTube would be well advised to keep a close eye on. Just a few months ago, Mark Zuckerberg delivered a surprising statistic when he said that Facebook users watch 4 billion videos every single day. When coupled with the fact that most new videos aren’t coming by way of YouTube, it increasingly becoming apparent that Facebook poses a strategic threat to YouTube’s well-deserved video dominance.
Zuckerberg, who has demonstrated a knack for ensuring that Facebook remains relevant in the fast-paced world of tech, is keenly aware of how important video is as a strategic asset. During an earnings conference this past October, the Facebook CEO explained why “video is a big priority.”
Most of the content on Facebook is things that people are sharing with their friends and the people around them. So I think we’ll continue to see that in video as well.
There’s definitely this trend over the last few years where, if you go back five years, most of the content
was text. Now a lot of it is photos, and if you look in the future as networks get better and the ability to
capture good video and share it in a good way improves, then I think that going forward, a lot of the
content that people share will be video. It’s just very compelling.
Additionally, the time Facebook users are spending watching videos is also on the rise. A January report in Ad Age relayed that “the number of videos showing up in people’s news feeds has increased by 360% compared to last year.”
