Google+ has long competed with Facebook in the social media arena, but it’s pretty difficult to go up against Facebook. After all, the network is entrenched into everyday life for the majority of Western users. Where Facebook cannot compete with Google is in advertizing and video marketing, with Google owning YouTube and providing ads pretty much everywhere online. Facebook knows that the only real way to make any money is with advertizing and for years now, the new feed has steadily become more and more littered with ads. Still, the service remains free to users, so there’s always going to be a trade off. Facebook has been pushing videos in the news feed for some time now, and it looks like they’re ready to take on YouTube by allowing them to be embedded outside of Facebook.
It’s Facebook’s annual developer conference this week, and one of the highlights is the announcement that soon Facebook videos will be available to be embedded anywhere on the web, with the pasting of a little bit of code. This is a big deal, as the majority of websites – such as ourselves – will embed YouTube videos in articles or posts because it’s super-simple to do. It’s arguable that one of the big successes of YouTube is that videos are all over the web and it’s super-easy to embed them. With Facebook adding the same feature, it could be the catalyst the network has been looking for to take their videos to the next level.
Facebook has been “unbundling” services from their main Android app, and it appears that this is a move to do something similar online. While Facebook would of course prefer you to spend as much time as possible on Facebook.com, that’s simply not how the majority of savvy users will do things, as such spreading videos around the web could be a way of exposing people to Facebook anywhere on the web and of course bringing them back to the main site. The feature should be available very soon.