Buzzfeed’s thriving video production arm is a good barometer for the state of video distribution on the web, so Ze Frank, president of Buzzfeed Motion Pictures, is a great source if you want to take measure of the market.
And the majority of that market is still controlled by YouTube, Frank said Tuesday at the Code/Media conference at The Ritz-Carlton in Laguna Niguel, Calif. Facebook, however, is gaining ground, he said. “It’s very, very significant.”
Frank leads a group of 160 employees at Buzzfeed’s Hollywood studio who produce 50 videos a week for the company. Most are short-form, snackable videos that play well on social networks. They are enormously popular, generating 950 million views a month. Only 5% of those views come on the Buzzfeed.com, so 95% of the audience comes from other platforms.
Other than YouTube, Facebook’s is the most notable and its decision to autoplay video in users streams is changing how Buzzfeed produces video, Frank said.
“Facebook’s decision to lean into autoplay has really fundamentally changed the way we think about the first five seconds of content,” he said.
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