Facebook is very keen to be a serious alternative to YouTube. Over the last year it’s grown views to over 4 billion per day, launched a revenue sharing scheme for creators and started autoplaying videos in your Newsfeed.
A few tweaks we’ve noticed quietly being tested show just how eager Facebook is to stop you going to YouTube for video.
When you try to paste a YouTube link onto a page, you’ll see a tiny warning below the share box encouraging you to upload to Facebook instead. It teases higher impressions and the ability to track videos as a reason to do so.
The social network also rolled out a major upgrade to its video uploader yesterday that shows just how serious it is about becoming a major video player. It now offers options for disabling embedding, adding categories and sharing as an ‘unlisted’ video — just like YouTube.
Unfortunately for the social network its tools are also making it a popular place for people to steal videos from other services and upload them as their own. Uploading proven viral videos is a popular way to growth hack a page to success, since Facebook prioritizes native video in News Feed.
Unlike YouTube, Facebook doesn’t provide a copyright identification tool to automatically detect stolen videos — owners must find and flag them manually, which is a huge issue for content creators.
Facebook prompting users to upload is a bold move, carefully crafted to pull them away from sharing on other services. It’s yet another subtle way the company is trying to make inroads as the place for video.
The statistics that the company is putting out back up that it’s working, though — 4 billion views every day is a huge number, one that creators should be paying close attention to as Facebook pushes even harder to get original content.
source: thenextweb.com
