Facebook gaining on YouTube

According to a comScore, Facebook has taken over Yahoo as the internet's second most popular video site in terms of total unique viewers, and is now only second to Google/YouTube. Looking at the numbers a little more closely, it's apparent that Google/YouTube need not be worried quite yet, as it still retains a 3x lead in total unique viewers over Facebook (157 million vs. 53 million).

This article on reelseo.com, gives 10 reason why Facebook videos provide a compelling advantage for marketers, which I would summarize in 3 categories

1. A captive (I bet you have a Facebook window open behind this window, don't you?), personally identifiable audience (i.e. you don't have to follow a link to another site to view the videos while getting your daily Facebook fix)

2. A built-in friend/fan base for videos - if I post of video of cats being cats on YouTube, I'll probably get at least a few  thousand views, but if I post a wedding video on YouTube, I'd have to explicitly email my friends to have them know it exists...but if I post it to my Facebook wall, promotion is done - and marketers would LOVE to know that someone had just gotten married.

3. People tagging - Facebook allows you to tag people (through keywords) in the video. Once you do,  the video is posted on THEIR walls as well...if it's a funny video, you could have an automatic viral hit on your hands.

Looking forward, as Facebook works out the privacy issue, you might see auto-tagging of friends in videos using currently available facial recognition technology along with location information (if not through built-in GPS data, then perhaps image recognition of famous landmarks) adding even more value to that giant personal home video collection sitting on Facebook's servers.

Maybe Facebook is just waiting for people to give in to the Matrix get sufficiently desensitized to having their private information used for commercial advertising (you don't see people abandoning Google en masse despite their  extensive profile of your search behaviors) to be able to activate the latent value in their video assets.


http://www.reelseo.com/facebook-video-marketing/


http://allfacebook.com/facebook-video-comscore-2_b97623