Why Facebook is a company to watch in online video
In the last month, Facebook has overtaken sites like ESPN, ABC and CBS to become the number three video site on the Web.
Just a short month ago, Facebook was in tenth place in online video. Now it has skyrocketed to third place in a surprising leap.
What’s most interesting is that people haven’t just started watching videos on Facebook, they’ve actually started uploading them to their profile. This is a huge change in behavior from the Web 2.0 standard- upload the video to YouTube and embed it everywhere else.
While this is a different behavior from people sharing their videos, it’s not completely unexpected. Unless you’re creating original video in hopes of starting a viral loop or marketing to a wide audience, YouTube is fairly unnecessary.
Besides that, Facebook offers two things that YouTube wasn’t built for: both inherent privacy controls and targeting the right audience. Compared to Facebook, YouTube is like standing up in front of a crowded theater to show your home videos when nobody cares.
On YouTube, anyone with a computer and too much time on their hands can check out your home videos and comment on your life. While some people might like that, many just want a way to share their videos with family and friends.
This is exactly what Facebook was meant for. Not only that, but Facebook published your video automatically to all your friends and family on the site as opposed to having to send a link to your YouTube video to your network in an email.
However there’s still a wide gap between Facebook and the two frontrunners in the online video market: YouTube and Hulu. These sites are centered around video and in YouTube’s case, self-publishing.
To put the video market in perspective, YouTube streams over 6 million videos per month and Hulu over 600,000. Everyone else is in the 100- 200 thousand range (Facebook came in at 217,000).
It will be interesting to see if users start turning to Facebook en masse to host their home videos. Even by claiming part of YouTube’s video share, Facebook could end up passing Hulu and leaving most of the online video pack in the dust.
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