In just seven months, Facebook has been able to double the number of video views it generates, and that insane growth rate doesn’t look to be slowing down anytime soon. Further proving that it’s the biggest threat to YouTube the world has ever seen, Facebook now sees more than eight million video views from 500 million users every day, which is up from about four billion back in April. It should be noted that Facebook considers a view to be anything more than three seconds of watching, but the company is still generating 760 years of watch time every day, so it’s definitely popular.
Facebook video viewership is growing by leaps and bounds. It now sees 8 billion average daily video views from 500 million users. That’s up from just 4 billion video views per day in April. Mark Zuckerberg made the announcement on the call to investors following Facebook’s blockbuster Q3 2015 earnings report. Some might contend that this stat isn’t totally accurate since Facebook counts just 3 seconds of watching as a “view”. But the 100% growth in seven months shows that even when controlling for this limitation of the metric, users are still voraciously consuming videos. Even at just 3 seconds per view, Facebook is generating 760 years of watch time each day. That means there’s a ton of space for Facebook to lure in TV commercial dollars that are shifting to digital. It also has an opportunity to grow viewership further with an ongoing test where it pays a revenue share to top video creators. The new stat explains why Facebook is running a ton of experiments on how it can get users to watch more videos after the discover one. It’s testing a Suggested Video interface on web and mobile the recommends additional clips to watch based on all the information Facebook knows about people. It’s this personal data that could give Facebook an edge in discovery as it competes with YouTube.
