“A year or two from now, we think Facebook will be mostly video.”
Facebook head of ad products Ted Zagat.
In a very short time, Facebook has seriously started encroaching on YouTube’s once-dominant video turf. Now, the social network with a billion same-day users wants to put YouTube in its shadow. “A year or two from now, we think Facebook will be mostly video,” Facebook head of ad product Ted Zagat explained during Variety’s Entertainment and Technology Summit in Los Angeles this week.
Zagat isn’t just reading the tea leaves: according to the latest stats, Facebook is already serving four billion videos daily, quadruple the number from last year. But beyond cute baby videos, Facebook is seeing huge revenue upside from a video-heavy platform, especially with big-budget advertisers. That involves massive infrastructure upgrades, not to mention continued advertiser hand-holding. In the latest tweak, Facebook is now offering advertisers ‘100 percent viewability’ on video advertisements, a move designed to calm a major complaint among clients.
Video sucks. Long live video!
Facebook video is almost entirely auto-play videos that only run for as long as it takes the user to find and stop it. But sure, 4 billion auto-played-until-stopped views per day.
If in two years Facebook is mostly this auto-play bullshit, goodbye Facebook.
Facebook autoplay – padding view numbers and eating data plans since 2014.