Marketers are all aflutter about Facebook’s potential for video marketing, especially after the social media giant’s announcement that it was now totaling 4 billion video views each day—after hitting the 3 billion views-per-day milestone in January.
The rapid growth of Facebook’s video viewership has led many to question whether the social media giant will soon surpass (and perhaps even overwhelm) the current leader in online video, YouTube.
Facebook’s Offerings
Facebook may be pleased to have such a large number of daily video views, but are they really even that valuable? A large contributor to Facebook’s view count is the introduction of autoplay: a video will begin playing on mute the moment it appears in an individual’s newsfeed.
Facebook counts a video as “viewed” when it plays for three seconds in a newsfeed, regardless of whether that person chose to un-mute it. So while Facebook can tout that it has achieved the milestone of 4 billion video views a day, the truth is that the number of videos viewed in a meaningful way is actually much lower…
