Is Facebook set to become more like Netflix or YouTube?
Internet users of the future will spend even more time each day staring at their screens,聽at least if Facebook has its way.
The social media giant is doubling down on its prediction that video is the future. 鈥淲e鈥檙e focusing more on shorter form content to start,鈥� chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg said of the company鈥檚 video strategy at Thursday's fourth quarter earnings call. The move will put it into direct competition with YouTube, although other plans take aim at streaming giant Netflix as well.
Despite its vigorous denial of the term, . Second only to Google鈥檚 parent Alphabet in digital advertising, the social network depends on attracting the attention of its users and selling it to advertisers to turn a profit.
But even the infinitely scrolling newsfeed can鈥檛 cram in enough ads to maintain the level of revenue growth it strives for. The company has known since at least last November that the Newsfeed was running out of ad-room, and executives predicted that revenue growth would 鈥溾�� in 2017, The Wall Street Journal reports.
The solution? Video. Companies are willing to pay more for video ads than text or images, which dovetails nicely with Mr. Zuckerberg鈥檚 opinion that video is a 鈥�megatrend,鈥� as 海角大神 previously reported:
Five years from now, your Facebook newsfeed will "probably" be "all video," according to Facebook executive Nicola Mendelsohn....
"The best way to tell stories in this world, where so much information is coming at us, actually is video," Mrs. Mendelsohn said. " So actually the trend helps us to digest much more information."鈥�
Studies have shown that native videos 鈥� videos posted to Facebook directly by users or pages 鈥� also receive more likes, comments, and shares than other content. Newswhip found that while user engagement with links posted to Facebook by media publishers declined significantly over the past year, .
The question is, how will Facebook draw our eyeballs away from Netflix binges and Youtube sprees, not to mention plain old TV? Facebook has already dropped some hints with the recent rollout of Facebook Live.
The first thing you need is content, and for that Facebook engaged in a practice known as 鈥渟eeding,鈥� where the company . As the service gains popularity, more producers will likely join, which Facebook hopes will open the door to sell more advertising. Once there鈥檚 enough momentum the service is essentially paying for itself.
Facebook鈥檚 chief financial officer David Wehner said 鈥渙ur focus was on here for the video tab ... We鈥檙e looking at a wide range of content,鈥� TechCrunch reports.
For now, that content will likely be short clips that users watch on the spot, the moment the video grabs their attention. From internal data, Facebook knows that people tend to stumble upon videos in their newsfeeds and watch them spontaneously, and similarly quick clips will likely be Zuckerberg鈥檚 鈥� primary focus for the foreseeable future.鈥� You might call this the YouTube model.
But eventually, Facebook wants to be a proper go-to destination for video. 鈥淭he experience is designed to deliver on that promise 鈥� [that] you want to watch videos, you want to keep up with the content that you watch episodically week over week. This is going to be the place where you go to do that.鈥� Zuckerberg said.
According to Recode, Facebook is already about licensing shows. It even has plans to make the leap from devices to TVs with a set-top box app in development, The Wall Street Journal reports. These moves may start to encroach on the Netflix/Amazon territory.
Regardless of whether Facebook catches viewers gaze with short clips or longer, episodic content, it all comes back to advertising. Rather than employing the 鈥減re-load鈥� ads of YouTube fame that risk irritating the viewer, Facebook is that run in the middle of content, more like a traditional TV ad.
Live, long form, short form 鈥� in some sense Facebook is kind of throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks, and Zuckerberg doesn鈥檛 deny it. 鈥淥ver the longer term ... people will experiment with longer forms of video as well as all kinds of different things.鈥�
But when you鈥檙e surfing on a megatrend, trying everything may be the only thing that makes sense. The number of videos played on Facebook surged from 4 billion a day to 8 billion, in less than a year. The most conservative assumption of 3 seconds per video translates 8 billion views into 760 years of daily watch-time.
