Facebook’s video ambitions are no hidden sauce. The social networking giant has been aggressively pursuing to become a solid YouTube rival. Well, looks like the company now finally has some really strong numbers to back that ambition — 8 Billion daily video views, from over 500 Million users, taking into account Facebook’s own videoviews measurement technique.
The same came out during Facebook’s earnings report today, along with many other staggering numbers. The growth rate for Facebook’s video views is a gargantuan 100%, considering that the company had 4 Billion video views in the month of April.
Many have already started comparing Facebook’s video platform with that of Youtube — largely due to multiple video-specific deals which the former has been signing in recent past. And while those deals form the business aspect, on the tech front too, Facebook has been bringing regular enhancements to its platform.
More recent enhancements include a dedicated video feed, support for more videos within Instagram (similar to Twitter Moments), and its pursuit of premium advertisers with large TV budgets. More recently, we saw Facebook tweaking its mobile app interface to give videos a more prominent presence.
However, there are still contrasting differences between how video views are perceived by both companies. For instance, a report earlier this year had suggested how Facebook takes into account even the minutest view people get on a video in their news feed. YouTube on the other hand, had very strict standards set for video counts and is an undisputed leader in the long-form content category.
In comparison, Google had announced that YouTube had reached 4 Billion daily video views in 2012 — but again, the viewing time taken into account is longer by Youtube as compared to Facebook. Thus, going by Facebook;s metrics, this number could be much larger.
