Facebook reported another banner year yesterday, touting huge growth across the board. Ad revenue is up, daily active user numbers grew, and CEO Zuckerberg says his social media site is now seeing 100 million hours of video watched daily.
“Video is an important part of the Facebook experience, and continuing to invest here is important for allowing people to share and consume some of the most engaging content,” said Zuckerberg during yesterday’s earnings call. “We’ve continued to make progress and now 100 million hours of video are watched daily on Facebook.”
The CEO went on to say Facebook is working on a “dedicated place” for people who just want to watch videos.
Facebook also boasted video ad views, calling out Microsoft Xbox on its use of Facebook and Instagram videos for the Halo 5 launch.
“They understood that people watch video differently in mobile news feed than on TV, so they created videos to capture audience attention in the first three seconds even without sound,” said Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.
According to Sandberg, Microsoft’s videos generated more than 380 million impressions and 49 million video views, raising purchase intent by 10 points in the US.
Sandberg repeated Zuckerberg’s comments on the importance of video for Facebook’s overall growth.
“Video ads are important on our platform and the most important thing that’s growing,” said Sandberg, “We have 500 million people watching video a day. And the fact that so much video is being consumed on our platform gives us room for an ads business to grow because we want the formats to match.”
Sandberg says its not just big brands using Facebook video ads: SMBs uploaded 1.5 million videos — both organic and paid — in the last month.
In addition to Zuckerberg’s hints at a possible dedicated video app, Facebook touched on a number of its video efforts during the past year, including its video-looping Boomerang app launched in October, the video calling feature now available via the Messenger app, and the video channel it introduced on Instagram that lets users watch moments from big events in real time.
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