CHICAGO — Less than a year after it began testing auto-playing video, Facebook is the winner in a tipping point against rival Google.
“In the month of August, on desktop viewing, they delivered about a billion more views than YouTube – which is pretty amazing,” co-founder and chairman emeritus Gian Fulgoni reveals to Beet.TV in this video interview.
“While there’ s reach advantage for auto-play, there’s an issue as to whether you’re getting good engagement. You’re getting good engagement from user-initiated (video on YouTube) by definition. If you figure how to create the video so it grabs people’s attention, you may have the benefits of high reach as well as engagement.”
Facebook still trails Google Sites for video views across total devices combined, according to comScore Video Metrix. But Facebook has come a long way in the last year, announcing in September it now gets a billion video views per day, with views having increased 50% from May through July of this year. The social network bought video ad tech firm LiveRail this summer as it plans to monetize those views.
One content company benefitting from Facebook’s success is made-for-mobile news operation NowThisNews, whose president Sean Mills tells Beet.TV: ”
Sean Mills. President of NowThisNews, a mobile/social news platform, says this about working with Facebook: “Our growth in monthly Facebook videos views has increased by 30X since July and we’re seeing tens of millions of views on Facebook each month. User engagement has also increased significantly and, in many ways, is the real indicator that we’re only seeing the beginning of the growth of quality video on Facebook.
“Through deep monitoring of Facebook data, we’ve learned a lot about what works in terms of story selection, scripting, formatting, frequency and timing of publishing across different categories of content.”
This video was produced in Chicago at the Beet.TV summit on branded video presented by the Jun Group. You can find more videos from the series here.
