We all know that Facebook is pretty much taking over every aspect in our life, by acquiring and/or eliminating it’s competitors like Myspace or Friendster. Remember them? No? Thought so. With the acquisition of video compression startup company QuickFire Networks, Facebook is taking a step to tackle YouTube.
First, dear readers, you’ll have to understand what this purchase means. QuickFire has figured out how to compress videos to a smaller size without losing video quality, by converting them to a different format. This is a huge development, especially in countries of the world where bandwidth is scarce, hence the perfect fit for the social network. The Zuck himself said in 2014, that Facebook is focusing much more on video in the future. Fact is, you or your page will receive a higher push from Facebook’s algorithm by posting Facebook videos versus images, normal status updates or – god forbid – external links to videos and soundbits.
This shows: The video traffic on Facebook has increased by 75% in the past year, while the number of videos showing up in people’s feeds has increased by 360%. Add the videos playing automatically to that, and we can see that Facebook’s aim to win over the video content throne from YouTube is apparent.
They have legit claim to the throne as well, being the number one content destination in this world, ranking second on the world’s foremost website ranking tool Alexa.org, just after Google. But then again, Google owned YouTube follows as a close third, and we shan’t forget that Google is the most used search engine with a marketshare of 67.4% over Bing and Yahoo. Obviously Google searches will always favor their own videos over external content.
Nonetheless, the thing that makes Facebook videos more attractive than YouTube videos is the personalization of the videos you’re receiving, and above all the lack of ads. Looking at streaming platforms like Spotify, that offer an ad-free premium version, YouTube has to step up it’s game or it could potentially lose it’s advantage over the Cupertino based social networking giant.
Article by: Julia Maehner
