Why Facebook Surpassing YouTube is a Bad Thing

YouTube, while technically a Google property, is considered the second largest search engine on the planet. 100 hours of video are uploaded each minute, 6 billion hours watched each month and 1 billion unique viewers every 30 days.

These are big numbers with folks watching everything from how-to videos, to commentary, to announcements to news and on and on. YouTube is a real wealth of easily searchable and indexable knowledge at your fingertips. Quite impressive actually.

In August of this year, Facebook surpassed YouTube by about a billion views. Remarkable.

“In the month of August, on desktop viewing, they delivered about a billion more views than YouTube, which is pretty amazing,” comScore co-founder and chairman emeritus Gian Fulgoni reveals to Beet.TV …

This is quite a feat but I have two problems with this. The first is that the videos are auto-played, which doesn’t necessarily infer engagement. If users are actively clicking on a video, they have more interest in the content that’s playing than if they’re shown a video automatically. It’s a grey area for the stats as the numbers are forced.

If you think about it, these numbers don’t necessarily mean much because there’s no intent. We have no idea what the viewer is doing while the video is playing. Are they watching, did they turn down the volume, did they turn off the video? We’re not certain.

My second problem is that YouTube isn’t exactly a walled garden while Facebook, which is trying to be more open, is still walled off. YouTube, as the second largest search engine depends on openness, as does the user, for ease of use and the ability to search simply. This isn’t going to happen with Facebook. Have you tried searching for a video on Facebook, it’s nearly impossible.

This isn’t necessarily a zero sum game but it’s close to being one. Users have only so much attention bandwidth to use within a day. If they’re stopping to watch videos on Facebook they’re watching less videos on YouTube. I could personally care less how a user consumes content but I prefer that users intend to watch what they’re watching while having the luxury to search for other content as they see fit.

Facebook’s numbers don’t instill confidence nor optimism unless of course you’re Facebook. I’d prefer letting users watch videos by choice from platforms that are open.