According to the latest data from Facebook, about 500 million people spent 100 million hours watching videos on this social network every day. Meanwhile, YouTube, the leading online video service, has avoided announcing the exact video viewing time in recent years. Google - a subsidiary of Alphabet - reported that the video viewing time on YouTube increased by 60% in the company’s nearest quarter. In particular, the viewing time on mobile devices doubled, but users only knew a vague figure that there were “millions of video watching hours” on this service each day.
In recent months, Facebook has started testing many direct ways to make money with videos on their service. When users click on the full screen mode, they will find that after the video is complete, a list of related videos will appear below so that users can continue to select and view.
Facebook also is researching a feature for those who just want to see videos. If this feature is widely released to users, Facebook will compete directly with YouTube. This obviously is a good opportunity for them to insert ads into videos and earn more money.
CFO Dave Wehner said advertising on videos only had very little impact on the overall revenue in terms of Facebook advertising. Currently, videos mainly serve the interaction between users of social networks. He explained that each of users’ video on News Feed would be replaced with ads in different formats. With 100 million video viewing hours each day, Facebook said that the company needed to start making money from video auto-play feature on their services. Specifically, they will make money from video views on the service, if users stop at the video about 3 seconds or more, it is counted as a view. This calculation is quite beneficial to Facebook because when users scroll to the content with video, the auto-play feature to run this video will be activated.
YouTube reports that their revenue was $ 4 billion in 2014. Meanwhile, in 2015, Facebook earned around $ 17.9 billion in revenue, mostly from advertising for videos. Thus, making money directly from video views will serve as an incentive to increase revenue for Facebook in the near future.
In addition, creating new ways to make money from videos can attract more talent using Facebook’s platform to create videos for users. Facebook is also testing the distribution of profit percentage for video creators to draw high quality video channels to its service.
Facebook seems to want to make watching video on their service became popular like the way users look at the images and click on the link. They have changed some algorithms of News Feed to prioritize video and encouraged users to upload videos to social networks to experience new features.
The most recent update of Facebook is allowing live streaming. YouTube also supports it via the third party apps, but not allows directly from the original YouTube application. This move of Facebook aims to attract many users to download and view videos. When this feature becomes more popular, Facebook will have a good opportunity to increase the time users watch videos on their service everyday. Meanwhile, YouTube is at risk of behind competitors like Facebook, Periscope.
Despite of being inferior in terms of video watching time than YouTube, Facebook is expected to quickly catch up with rivals. Facebook’s real potential lies in increasing the participation of users in videos and directly earning money from it.
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