Thursday, August 6, 2015

A Look At Facebook's Big Video Problems

Facebook video image
At over 4 billion video views a day, Facebook now claims that more people watch videos on the platform than on YouTube.

That figure may be deceiving however, as it's come to light that the social network has a much less stringent method of valuing a view than YouTube does.

For instance, Facebook counts almost anything as a view, regardless of how long a person watches, or even if they watch with the sound off.

YouTube doesn't count a view as a "view" until around the 30 second mark, or a sufficient amount of time has past to signal real engagement.

As you can imagine, this has lead both creators and advertisers to look at Facebook video views as far less valuable than on YouTube.

Another major problem for the network is that it has no way of monetizing a video, so a content creator with millions of views won't earn a penny. Even worse, there's no Content ID-like system akin to YouTube where you can monitor if anyone else is using your copyrighted material.

The one thing Facebook Video does have going for it is that it currently favors videos over all other content, and therefore pushes it out to 100% of your following, as compared to posts, which currently are seen by 2 to 3% if you don't pay to promote it.

Facebook is too large and too smart to let these problems stand for long, so look for either workarounds or true fixes soon. In the meantime, don't take the view count too seriously.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

A further issue with Facebook counting views is that videos automatically play when you scroll past them on your wall. Therefore I am sure there is a large percentage of views that are not genuine. Overall youtube is more likely to be accurate.

LinkWithin

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...