• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, December 13, 2018

Facebook plans to renew a set of video originals for the second season to serve the more than 400 million people who spend at least one minute per month on Facebook Watch, a streaming video competitor to YouTube.

It’s a hub for shows and premium video content announced in August 2017, which went mobile in August 2018. The originals that are back for another year include Five Points, Huda Boss, Sacred Lies, and Sorry For Your Loss.

Facebook invested more than $1 billion to buy original shows and content for Watch, according to Variety.

In 2018, Red Table Talk took the distinction of becoming the most followed show. Sorry For Your Loss has the most loyal fans. Confetti was the show with the most comments. And Returning the Favor, Operation Combat Bikesaver, was the most viewed episode

Facebook is working to unify the video experience across its services. Today, people can find videos on Facebook in Watch, News Feed, Search, Pages and more.

“As part of this effort, we'll be testing a few things in the coming months, like creating a darker background whenever you immerse yourself into a video on mobile, unifying these different viewing experiences under one,” Fidji Simo, head of video at Facebook, wrote in a blog post.

The service, now available globally, continues to attract viewers. Every day, more than 75 million people spend at least one minute on Watch. On average. these 75 million daily visitors spend more than 20 minutes in the service.

As for the original content, Jada Pinkett Smith's breakout talk show Red Table Talk has about 4.2 million followers, 234 million views in total for its 17 episodes.

Growth also has come from Ad Breaks, a platform that allows content providers to include ads in their eligible videos to earn money.

Facebook also launched Ad Breaks in five countries last August, and has been focused on rolling out the short ads you can include in your eligible videos to earn money. Ads are placed at natural breaks in the streaming video content, or the creator can choose the placements.

No one can argue that compared with YouTube, Facebook has a small audience. Google said in May that YouTube had 1.8 billion logged-in viewers monthly.

Original content might have a positive showing, but not all streaming TV shows fare well on social.

Earlier this month, Facebook launched the very popular cult classic, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” as well as “Angel” and “Firefly,” for free in the U.S. to users. During the first week the three shows had generated 949,000 views, with about 598,000 for “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” Season One, Episode One, which took in 433,000 views, according to Variety.