Facebook grew video from 1 billion views per day to 4 billion views per day in the span of about six months from September to the end of March. The passive News Feed lets Facebook serve up just about anything, including videos, to its users. But, are YouTube’s talent migrating to Facebook?
If Facebook wants to attract top content makers from Google’s YouTube, it needs to overcome one huge obstacle: YouTube stars have spent years developing a following on YouTube, not Facebook. As a result, posting videos on Facebook is almost always less effective in reaching as many viewers as YouTube. For example, PewDiePie, which has the description “businessy stuff,” has more than 38 million subscribers on YouTube. For him to build up a similar number of followers on Facebook would take a lot of time, and a lot of work.
There are several major obstacles in the way of Facebook attracting top YouTube talent. Facebook needs to help the talent it wants to attract establish an audience on its network. That could come via free advertising, or some other form of free promotion. More importantly, Facebook needs to provide YouTube creators some incentive to publish videos on its platform. Finally, Facebook needs to offer a Content ID system for publishers. Freebooting — taking online media and rehosting it on your website — has become a major problem on the social network. If Facebook can enable creators to capitalize on the popularity of other Pages on Facebook through some sort of revenue-sharing agreement, it could find a lot more success attracting top content creators to its platform.
But getting top content makers to leave YouTube may be nearly impossible, considering the established audiences for many of them on the site……
See full story on www.businessinsider.my
Image: REUTERS/Eric Gaillard