ComScore has revealed to Beet.TV the results of a recent study that shows in the month of August 2014, Facebook surpassed YouTube for most desktop videos per month. From July to August alone, Facebook went from 4 billion video views per month to 12 billion video views per month.
That’s a significant milestone, due in no small part to the auto-playing feature Facebook added to its videos less than one year ago.
“In the month of August, on desktop viewing, they [Facebook] delivered about a billion more views than YouTube,” ComScore co-founder Gian Fulgoni states in a video interview.
That sounds good on paper, but Fulgoni adds a caveat to consider. Auto-playing videos have the potential to give you maximum reach compared to user-initiated video. The percentage of people will initiating the videos will naturally be lower compared to when they’re on auto-play.
However, on auto-play there’s an issue as to whether you’re really getting good engagement from the videos. You certainly get good engagement from the user-initiated videos, because by playing the video the user has expressed their interest in seeing the content.
To combat this problem and find a balance between high reach and good engagement, Fulgoni believes content creators need to take a new approach to creating video.
Fulgoni says we need to find a way to grab people’s attention with auto-playing videos so that while the video is playing, users actually express interest in seeing the video. “Then I think you might well have the benefits of high reach as well as some good engagement,” Fulgoni adds.
When looking at video views across all devices, comScore found that Facebook is still trailing behind Google. For more information you can view comScore’s full Video Metrix study.
