In what will undoubtedly be a surprising turn of events for many, YouTube has been bumped off the top spot for video views online. According to ComScore, Facebook displayed about a billion more video views than YouTube last month. The big move is primarily a result from Facebook’s fairly new ‘auto-play’ feature that has videos playing as soon as they are on your screen, which certainly raises questions about actual viewer engagement.
When you’re just looking at the numbers, however, Desktop YouTube videos were displayed 11.3 billion times in August, 2014. Facebook displayed 12.3 billion videos to people browsing on their desktops. What is perhaps more impressive is that Facebook was only showing about 700 million videos just over a year ago (June of 2013). This explosion of growth is quite astounding. During the same period (June 2013-August 2014) YouTube went from 15.7 billion views to 11.3.
It is an important distinction that this is only for desktop views, and only on Facebook vs. YouTube. When you add in mobile devices and all of Google’s web properties, Facebook still lags behind quite a bit. As Facebook continues to push video displays, however, this may change.
For marketers, this is just one more indication that posting your videos on YouTube isn’t enough. You should be using other sites as well, especially Facebook.
