Anything Facebook does is huge. And that’s due to the sheer size of the social media platform. With 1.04 billion daily active users (1.59 billion monthly active users) as of December 31st, 2015, it’s not hard to see why any of their new features get used quite a bit. On Facebook’s earnings call yesterday, the company talked about video and how important it is for the company and the platform. Facebook has their own video platform – so this isn’t counting YouTube views or any other video streaming services – and when you scroll through your news feed the video will autoplay, thus counting it as a view. A bit of a curve for views and stats, but according to the company, over 100 million hours of video are watched on Facebook each day.
In addition to 100 million hours of video being watched per day on Facebook, there are also 500 million users watching Facebook video each day. That’s roughly half of their daily active users, so there is still room for the company to grow, when it comes to video. Facebook’s CEO and Founder, Mark Zuckerberg stated on the earnings call yesterday that the company is still “exploring ways to give people a dedicated place on Facebook” to watch videos, and only videos. Facebook has been testing this already, as we’ve seen reports of Facebook looking to share ad revenue with video creators. A business model that YouTube has been doing with its creators for quite some time now.
Video is good for Facebook in a few ways. The most popular reason being the fact that users are spending more time on Facebook due to them watching video on the site. But also ads. More video views, means more video ads will be shown. And video ads are more expensive, for a few reasons. In the end that means more revenue for Facebook, something that investors love to see. Facebook Video has steadily been increasing and getting larger each quarter. Pretty soon it will likely compete with YouTube and give it some stiff competition. We are already seeing quite a few YouTube creators posting their videos on Facebook Video now, and that number is likely to increase over the next few months and even the next year.