I think we’ve come to a point where Facebook statistics are just “one of those things”.
The social media platform is reported to have 8 billion video views, per day. That’s about 240 billion times a video was played on the site, in one month. But I’m suspicious of those numbers. Not that they’re fabricated but because a lot of it comes from the fact that Facebook videos autoplay by default. You have to switch off the feature in your settings to put an end to it. And we know how often we go hunting in the Facebook settings tab (I still get Candy Crush notifications despite knowing there’s a setting to put a stop to it, forever).
Nice play, Zuckerberg.
So those 8 billion views are not actually 8 billion people clicking play on videos. This is the reason why PR people love statistics. It’s easy to tell the story you want to tell.
Nevertheless, I’ll bite. 8 billion video hits. Wow! That’s something. I can think of a few things Facebook could do with those numbers.
As at 2012, Youtube was averaging 4 billion video views daily. With 8 billion daily video views, I’m sure Facebook sees the opportunity video is presenting them. And even though Youtube doesn’t need to lose any sleep over those numbers (some of those videos are embedded youtube videos), it does present Facebook with more possibilities of generating more revenue.
And while we’re on the subject, now would be a good time to get rid of that interface as the current one just looks out of place in 2015.
A VEVO-like service should be in the works as music videos continue to soar in popularity across the web. It took seven years before we had a video crack the 1 billion mark on Youtube (remember Gangnam style?) but since then, we’ve had ten videos getting 1 billion views, eight of which came out between last year and this year. I imagine several partnerships brewing as Facebook announced their numbers.
And that’s just music.
Youtube has already opened up its revenue streams with the introduction of Youtube Red. But that’s a premium service. Facebook could do them one better by creating the same thing and making it free for their most engaging video creators. That way, there’s incentive for more people to upload high quality content and push it themselves.
More than anything, I think this takes priority. Convincing advertisers that Facebook Video ads are worth investing in would be the primary task for the Facebook team as the year closes out. And nothing convinces people better than success stories. So, when the platform can show data proving that video hits converts into good numbers also for advertisers, Facebook will have another cash cow on its hands.
