Commentary
Facebook On YouTube's Tail
- by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, October 1, 2010
After a year of impressive growth as a video distribution powerhouse, Facebook takes is well-earned place as the number two video property by audience on the Web. According to the comScore Online Video Rankings for August, the social network (or do we have to call it "The Social Network" now?) had an audience of 58.6 million viewers piling up 243 million video sessions, What Facebook does not deliver, however, is a long hang time.
For the month the site serve 20.5 minutes of video to each user, compared to YouTube's massive 269.5 minutes (that is over 4 hours a month) of average viewing time per person. Eighty-five percent of U.S. Web users now view video online, and the average size of digital videos was 4.8 minutes.
Despite the relentless soap opera that is Yahoo, the portal remains the third biggest video site with 54 million users. The head of their entertainment group Jimmy Pitaro is said to be leaving, along with other key executives. Pitaro spearheaded a number of video initiatives, and even as he leaves Yahoo is launching the "Ready, Set Dance" reality dance competition (produced by Electus) and "Fast Fix," a political news daily with Washington Post's 'The Fix' columnist Chris Cillizza. VEVO, the other great video success story of 2010 is now reaching 45.3 million viewers. It boasts a monthly viewing time (69 minutes) second only to Google/Youtube.
Notably, Hulu has fallen off of the top ten list of video destinations by reach but it leads the others in 'ads viewed' with 790 million served - 30.2 per customer. The overall volume of online video advertising is getting large. Just over 10% of all videos viewed online were ads, according to comScore. Yet, video ad viewing only accounted for 1% of time spent viewing video. Imagine if only 1% of time spent in front of the living room TV was consumed by ads. This ad metric in particular supports an argument that comScore analyst Tania Yuki has been making all year - that online video can bear a heavier ad load without breaking much of a sweat.
Steve Smith is Editorial Director of Events for MediaPost
Come on Steve you are better than this. Why is 0.5 videos watched per user per month impressive? Or why is 1 of 9 Facebook users per month watching videos impressive? Story to watch? maybe. Will video views get large enough before we all leave Facebook for the next great network or technology? maybe.
How many of the videos viewed on Facebook are hosted on YouTube? A lot of what I see on Facebook are links to video from other sites, making Facebook an important gateway, but not necessarily a repository of content.
Inquiring minds want to know.
Beg to differ Howie. .5 videos per person is impressive at this scale. As I mention, hang time is tiny compared to YouTube, but as a video discovery mechanism, Facebook has to be considered more than trivial.
I'm with Michael. FB is an important gateway, but represents video snacking, not consumption.