Facebook Users Are Posting 75% More Videos Than Last Year

In the past year Facebook has become widely considered YouTube's biggest potential rival. Not only are people watching a lot of video on Facebook, but they are uploading a lot of video to Facebook. People around the world are posting 75% more videos to Facebook than they did a year ago, the company announced on Wednesday. And that growth is steeper in the U.S. where people are posting 94% more videos to the social network. Coinciding with the increase of videos being uploaded to Facebook, videos are also overtaking more of the web's most valuable real estate, the Facebook news feed. The number of videos showing up in people's news feeds has increased by 360% compared to last year. It seems that as Facebook transformed itself into a mobile-first company over the past few years, it is now being converted into a video-first property. It's unclear whether video has become the dominant news-feed content type; a Facebook spokeswoman wouldn't provide that stat. And it's also unclear whether a year or two from now Facebook will need to pull back the number of videos in people's feeds -- as it's done with social-gaming posts and brand posts -- or whether video will solidify itself as Facebook's primary content format. "Video is a very big priority," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during the company's third-quarter earnings call in October. He added that just as photos usurped text as the dominant content type shared on Facebook, in the future "a lot of the content that people share will be video." Apparently that future is now. The Facebook spokeswoman declined to send hard numbers regarding how many videos people are posting to the social network and how many videos are appearing in the average news feed. For some context, in September Facebook said that the number of video views on Facebook grew by 50% between May 2014 and July 2014 and that between June 2014 and September 2014 people collectively averaged 1 billion video views on Facebook each day. At the time the company also said that more than 65% of those views are happening on smartphones and tablets, which is still the case four months later.

Facebook Users Are Posting 75% More Videos Than Last Year

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