In Facebook's house, Facebook gets what Facebook wants. And what Facebook wants right now is to challenge YouTube for dominance in video consumption.
Big surprise: Facebook is now challenging YouTube for dominance in video consumption -- within its walls, anyway. According to Socialbakers, a social media analytics company, native Facebook videos are on the verge of catching up with YouTube videos in terms of the number of shares.
"For YouTube, this is clearly a bad thing," says Socialbakers CEO Jan Rezab. "If I were them, I would be extremely worried."
Here's the trend, representing 180,000 posts across 20,000 Facebook pages over the last 12 months.
And when it comes to engagement around videos on Facebook, the house is already ahead, by a lot, and has been for a while. This is what that trend looks like:
Facebook's edge on engagement is likely what's spurring creators like brands and celebrities to shift their distribution emphasis from YouTube to native Facebook videos, says Rezab. "It's much easier to like, comment and interact" on the native videos, he says.
And in case you're wondering, this is not all a result of the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. "This is not a statistical anomaly," says Rezab. "We have specific examples of brands that only shared YouTube videos and then started only sharing Facebook videos." Facebook, he says, has become "kind of the majority place where people discover video content in this world."
