Facebook Video Soars Past 4 Billion Daily Views

Facebook video has taken another big jump. CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced today that Facebook is now serving more than 4 billion video views a day on the network. That’s up a cool billion from January and quadruple the daily views reported in September.

The news isn’t really surprising — how much video have you seen in your News Feed lately? — but it will no doubt prompt more discussion about the threat Facebook poses to online video king YouTube. The last time Google’s video network reported stats for daily views in January 2012, it said it had 4 billion. That’s likely higher now. But metric comparisons between the two services are tricky because Facebook counts a three second pause on one of its autoplay videos as a view while YouTube’s count is triggered after a longer duration.

Clearly though, Facebook’s major player status in video is growing stronger. Video also ties in nicely into its mobile and advertising strategies as COO Sheryl Sandberg noted during the company’s first quarter earnings call.  More than 75% of video views on Facebook come from mobile devices, she said, and the fact that there’s so much video consumption means people have been primed to see video ads.  “We’ve always believed that the format of our ads should follow the format of what consumers are doing on Facebook,” she said.

[pullquote]”Over 1 million SMBs have posted videos and done really small ad buys around them. And that’s pretty cool because I don’t think there are 1 million advertisers who have bought TV ads in that same period of time.”[/pullquote]

It’s a ripe opportunity for marketers, Sandberg said, noting that brands and even SMBs are taking advantage.

“Brand marketers particularly but I think all marketers have the opportunity to do video,” she said. “And that’s pretty exciting, even SMBs who never would be able to hire a film crew and buy a TV ad. Over 1 million SMBs have posted videos and done really small ad buys around them. And that’s pretty cool because I don’t think there are 1 million advertisers who have bought TV ads in that same period of time.”

Zuckerberg also said 80,000 Facebook videos have been embedded on third-party sites in the first month after the feature was made available. And Zuckerberg said spherical video will be coming to people’s News Feeds this year.

“Supporting new types of content like this,” he said, “is an important part of preparing for the future of how people want to share.”

Some other interesting notes from today’s Facebook call:

• People make more than 1 billion searches on mobile per day on Facebook.
• Instagram now has 200 million people who use the service daily. Instagram users spend an average of 21 minutes daily on the network.
• In the United States, more than one of every five minutes spent on mobile are on Facebook or Instagram.
• More than 45 billion messages a day are sent on Facebook, Messenger and WhatsApp. Facebook has added VOIP calls to WhatsApp;  Messenger accounts for more than 10% of mobile VOIP calls globally.