Recent move show that Facebook is attempting to surpass YouTube on video services in coming time.
According to the latest data of Facebook show that 500 million people use 100 million hours per day to watch video on this social network.
While YouTube – the leading video-online service is sidestepped announcing exact duration of video watching of users in recent years. Google – subsidiary company of Alphabet – currently reports that the duration of watching video on YouTube has increased 60 percent in the latest quarter of the company. Therein, the duration of watching video on mobile device has increase double but the users only know vague number such as ‘million hours of watching’ on this service per day.
Ability to monetize is the most advantage of YouTube versus Facebook in current time (only count for video services).
New experiments have been done by Facebook
In these recent months, Facebook have started to experiment the way to monetize more directly on their video services. When the users click on view full screen video with sound, they will see the list of recommended videos after the running video finish.
Facebook is also doing research a function for the users who just want to watch video. If this function expand widely for users, Facebook is considered as a direct competitor to YouTube. Obviously that this good opportunity for Facebook to insert advertising video in other videos to make more money.
Financial director Dave Wehner said that advertising on video only impact very few to overall revenue of Facebook advertising side. Currently, the videos are mainly for interaction between the users of social network. Dave Wehner explain that each video of user on News Feed will be replaced by an advertising with different formats. With 100 million hours of watching video per day, Facebook say that the company need to start making money from the function of auto-playing video on mobile application development services. Particularly, they will make money from the number of view on their video services, if the user stop at a video more than 3 seconds, it can be counted as a view. This way of counting is beneficial for Facebook because when the users scroll to the video, the video automatically play.
YouTube reports that their revenue is 4 billion USD in 2014. While, in 2015, Facebook gain 17.9 billion USD for revenue, mainly from video advertising. Plus making money directly from video views is motivation for Facebook in coming time.
In addition, creating new way to make money from video through web application development can attract more talent on developing videos based on Facebook foundation. Facebook is also experimenting how to share the profits for video creators in order to attract high quality video channel to their video services.
Is anything else which Facebook going to develop videos?
Facebook seem to want to make that watching video on their service become popular as looking at a photo and click to the link. The company have changed algorithm on the News Feed function to prioritize video and promote the users upload videos on the social network for new experiences.
Once the function of ‘live streaming’ develop popularly, Facebook will have opportunities to increase the duration of video users in their service each day. While, YouTube does not support the function of ‘live streaming’ from original application, this will make them fail in competition with Facebook, Periscope.
Although it is still inferior YouTube at watching video duration but many people predict that Facebook will quickly catch up their competitors. Facebook has real potential on increasing the participating of the users on video and make money from this activity.
Whether or not the video service of Facebook is able to surpass big-guy YouTube? Let’s wait and see.
