Don’t say we didn’t warn you.
ComScore recently confirmed that Facebook had surpassed YouTube in video views on the desktop in the month of August. And it wasn’t even close, Facebook had over a billion more views than YouTube.
ComScore’s co-founder Gian Fulgoni revealed the stat in an interview with Beet.tv. However, it should be noted that this was only for views on the desktop, YouTube still maintained its lead in mobile views.
Fulgoni said several factors contributed to Facebook huge numbers. For starters, Facebook gives preferential treatment to video content, placing it higher in people’s news feeds. More importantly, videos in Facebook now play automatically when you scroll down your feed, albeit with no sound unless you click on them. That alone can heavily skew the view numbers, since it doesn’t mean people are necessarily engaging with the video.
However, you can bet that Facebook can’t wait to monetize those numbers with ads, and pretty soon its going to become one of the most coveted ad products on social media.
