Facebook, which started a video push last year, is still trying to figure out exactly how it wants to distribute clips to its 1.3 billion users, and how advertisers and video makers should work with the service.
Facebook Reminds Video Makers That Facebook Video Is Really Big
YouTube’s first real challenger shares a few stats about its rapid growth.
Peter Kafka covered media and technology, and their intersection, at Vox. Many of his stories can be found in his Kafka on Media newsletter, and he also hosts the Recode Media podcast.
But video is already very big at Facebook, with users watching more than a billion clips a day.
Now Facebook has a few more stats to illustrate just how big video has become. (Not that anyone I talk to in the video world has any questions about Facebook’s seriousness — everyone is convinced that this is the first real challenger YouTube has ever had.)
The new stats, via a post Facebook is putting up that’s supposed to tell people how to use video more effectively:
- Facebook users have been posting video more frequently over the last year. Video posts per user are up 75 percent around the world, and 94 percent in the U.S.
- Which means there’s more video in Facebook users’ News Feeds — the number of clips “from people and brands” is up 3.6x over the last year.
- Which means if you’re a frequent user of Facebook, you’re a frequent viewer of videos on Facebook. More than 50 percent of people who use Facebook daily in the U.S. are watching at least one video per day.
Okay. So what kind of stuff are people watching? Or, more importantly, what kind of stuff should people post? Facebook provides two examples, both from high-profile creators Facebook is trying to court: Ellen DeGeneres, and Time Inc.’s Time magazine.
Here’s the Ellen clip, of her wife, Portia de Rossi, engaged in some Jane Fonda. Facebook is using it as an example of “raw videos that are compelling, shareable, clips that no one else will have.”
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
