Google’s dominance of the online video ad sector is under threat, with new research showing that the number of videos directly upload to Facebook could soon surpass videos linked from YouTube.
The study, from Socialbakers, looked at more than 180,000 Facebook video posts from 20,000 Facebook pages, taking into account content uploaded to Facebook, as well as links to clips from YouTube, Instagram, Vimeo and others.
The results show that Facebook has been quickly gaining ground on YouTube as the dominant video format.
Evan James, Socialbakers’ Head of North American Marketing, discussed these results in a blog post: “Back in 2012, marketers were not even considering alternative options for sharing video content on Facebook. The standard process was to create a video, publish it to YouTube and share it via Facebook. However, the recent trend is clearly showing that content marketers are directly uploading video content to Facebook, meaning that Facebook is retaining the traffic at the expense of YouTube.
“At the beginning of 2014, YouTube clearly had the upper hand in regards to the share of number of video posts, nearly doubling that of the nearest contender. However, as the year progressed, we saw content marketers increasingly uploading videos to Facebook directly, with a 50% increase from May through July; and are trending to surpass YouTube by the end of the year.
While YouTube has been the dominant source of video content for a while, Facebook has traditionally been the most engaging. The study also notes that Facebook is soundly beating out links from YouTube in terms of interactions.”
By adding deeper analytics, Facebook has been trying to become more top-of-mind for Facebook marketers when they’re looking to publish video. The stats show that this is clearly working.
