Facebook gets 8 billion video views per day
Facebook announces that its daily views on its site are increasing tremendously today as it surpasses 8 billion daily Facebook views per day.
The new statistics was announced by its CEO Mark Zuckerberg during the company's third-quarter earnings report which saw its revenue increase and is performing better than expected.
The website is currently receiving around 1.55 billion monthly users and more than 1 billion people is using the website on a daily basis as reported by The Verge.
Based on the stat, it is not surprising that its video views are leaping by 100 percent from its previous 4 billion video views per day in April this year.
However, not everyone is agreeing with the new stat as a reliable report. This is due to the fact that Facebook has updated its video feature to autoplay a video when users scroll through a video on their newsfeed.
Besides that, Facebook also counts a 3-second viewing on any video as a complete view making the data more unreliable.
USA Today reported that Facebook is looking for a way to monetize the new video trend in near future as video advertisement will bring more profit to the company. Analysts also expecting that the company's video service could rival YouTube one day but there are still lots of works need to be done.
Michael Pachter of Wedbush Securities point out one major disadvantage for Facebook video is it is still lacking original content uploaded directly to the website. Currently, most of the videos on Facebook are taken from YouTube or shared by users from Vine and other video sharing platform.
Another analyst, Carlos Kirjner also noted that "Until Facebook successfully attracts original content/uploads, we think these ads will likely continue to be bid at a steep discount to YouTube"
To combat the issue, its ad product lead officer, Ted Zagat said that Facebook is continuously experimenting with a different way to improve its video viewing ability.
This includes Facebook experimenting with a new way of profit sharing method to increase original content uploaded on it according to TechCrunch.
Besides that, there will also be a better feature on Facebook soon including picture-in-picture viewing capabilities that allow users to view video while scrolling the news feed. There will also be a dedicated video feed platform too. However, it is still unclear when it will be released.
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said that video content is the next big step for Facebook as currently there are 1.5 million businesses shared a video on the website. There is a high chance that these businesses will try to advertise its video to get more customers.