• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, November 17, 2014

When you think about short online videos, you think YouTube — and increasingly, that’s not the only way to think.

A new report from Unruly, which tracks video sharing, notes that 59.4% of the video shares happen via Facebook, which seems mighty logical. 

But Unruly also cites comScore, which says the total number of video views via YouTube altogether has noticeably declined. From August of 2013 to March of 2014, it has dropped from 37.3% of the total to 23.7%. 

That’s major. More than three-quarters of all video views come from someplace other than YouTube.

This is a battle of giants, of course. YouTube doesn’t come with the same obvious privacy baggage that Facebook does — but Facebook brings a kind of familiarity to videos. Your friends might be posting video from YouTube, but they’re posting them on Facebook and that’s where you’re likely to see them.

Worldwide, the new Unruly study says, 17.9% of Internet users share videos on social sites more than once a week, and these very giving people account for more than 84% of all the sharing there is.

There are weird regional differences. German audiences tend to watch video ads all the way to conclusion — 77% of them do, anyway. South Koreans are more likely to click, replay or share ads than people from any other nation. Isn’t that nice? Or aren’t they crazy? Brazilians share videos with everybody they know; Americans only share with friends, and Brits mostly share with family.

Most of them, Unruly says, are seeking videos that tickle their happiness button —which these days seems like a good goal. How people find happiness differs from region to region. But we’d all like to teach the world to sing, apparently.

And increasingly, a lot of that viewing and sharing is happening via Facebook, which is eating into the video-watching business. “For the last decade YouTube has had a virtual monopoly over online video views —’ YouTube’ is almost as much of a verb to video as ‘Google’  is to search — but soon it could be in the middle of an existential crisis,” reports Business Insider. “This isn't just a niche specialist video app with the potential to carve off 5% or so of users, this is Facebook, which already has 1.35 billion at its disposal to tempt away from YouTube when it comes to their video needs.”