Four billion reasons YouTube should be afraid of Facebook Video

There are mounting volumes of evidence for YouTube, currently the leader in online video sharing, to be afraid of Facebook Video’s millstones.

The video sharing service of the popular social networking platform is now registering some four billion views daily, a 25 percent increase from January 2015. The rise in the number of daily viewers took longer for YouTube to achieve. YouTube spent eight months before it accomplished the 4-billion daily views.

It is not new, however, to many that Facebook Video has been in place for quite some time, and as to why it had taken a number of years before it finally gains momentum could be attributed to the fact that the Menlo Park company was testing the waters lately, what with the huge user base YouTube has.

It was only last year that Facebook rolled up its sleeves for some serious work to catapult its video sharing service to as far as it could reach, by tweaking the algorithms. The testing phase is over, and seems to be producing good results.

In the coming months, YouTube might be having a hard time competing with Facebook Video, which has the social edge to grow the platform further and even bigger than what YouTube has become to date.

And users are increasingly choosing Facebook Video over Google’s service. Facebook seems to be giving more highlight to video posts than text posts or photo uploads. That’s a major drawing factor that lures more users: exposure. The same is hard to achieve in YouTube as demonstrated by some users who took to the task of comparing the two services.

Try to upload a video to both Facebook and YouTube. Observe the rise in the number of views within the same time frame. Arguably, you would discover that in most cases Facebook videos get more views than YouTube clips within the same time of observation. And the difference is huge enough for you to reconsider which platform to choose.

What differentiates Facebook from YouTube is its rich social graph which gives emphasis on the convenience of users. In YouTube, you are the one who should be looking for content. In contrast, Facebook delivers the videos right to you through your News Feed. And that’s a major consideration in choosing between the two.

But Facebook is not at all the most convenient pick, however. Due to oversaturation, among other causes, Facebook videos will eventually be buried into oblivion while YouTube sees to it that your posts will always be available to the rest of the world. That you can’t compromise. After all, its permanent exposure that you wish for your content.