Facebook Is Now Serving 8 Billion Video Views A Day

Facebook’s video views continue to accelerate. As in pedal to the metal.

Facebook now sees an average of eight billion video views a day from 500 million people, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during the company’s quarterly earnings call today. That’s double the four billion daily views Facebook announced in April and a good indication of just how much momentum the company is building with its video efforts.

Of course, some will still argue that Facebook’s view totals are suspect because Facebook plays video automatically in the News Feeds of its 1.55 billion users and counts a view if a video is seen for as short as three seconds, but that argument is losing strength. Clearly, people are watching a tremendous amount of Facebook video. At a minimum Facebook is generating 760 years of video watch time daily, as Josh Constine of TechCrunch estimates.

Any way you look at it that’s a lot of attention. Facebook is still in the early days of monetizing that attention, but it’s beginning to make inroads. The company is piloting a program to give video publishers a cut of advertising revenue from premium videos they publish on Facebook. That’s the model used by YouTube, Facebook’s main competition for online video eyeballs, and if rolled out widely could increase the quantity and quality of video on the social network.

Facebook pushing video in many other ways, including testing a dedicated video feed, serving suggested videos to people after they’ve finished watching other videos, a floating video viewer to allow watching while continuing scroll through the News Feed and a more prominent “watch later” button for saving video.

Those efforts are only the beginning, Zuckerberg said. Generally, he said the plan is to create better ways for people to see all the video published by a Page they follow. Currently, most people are watching video they bump into in the News Feed.

“There’s a pretty clear roadmap of stuff that we are going to do in the next couple years that I’m quite excited about,” Zuckerberg said. “We’re just so early in this right now. It’s pretty amazing how quickly it’s growing. But there’s a lot more to do.”