Facebook claims eight billion daily video views

Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook now claims more than eight billion daily video views, with more than 500 million people watching content through the service each day.

The social network’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg revealed the figures during the firm’s third quarter earnings call, claiming that video is an area “where we continue to make progress.”

“We’ve added live video to our Mentions app for public figures, and we now support interactive 360 videos in News Feed. We’ve also rolled out new video tools for pages and begun testing a dedicated video section on Facebook,” said Zuckerberg.

“Over the next few years, video is going to be some of the most engaging content online, and by continuing to innovate here, we have a chance to build the best place to watch and share videos.”

Asked whether Facebook could eventually become a destination site for long-form content, Zuckerberg said that most videos viewed on the service today are short clips discovered by users in their news feed – an environment where users are not necessarily going to watch an hour-long video.

“I do think over time we will get to more different types of content and we’ll build products that serve that. The current market of trying to help people share and experience all these shorter form clips is massive. We are nowhere near serving that as well as we want to,” said Zuckerberg.

“The more interesting question is not in the near-term what we’re going to do to develop ways to consume long form content, but what traditional media and content producers, who have traditionally produced short and long form content, are going to do to chunk their stuff up better so that it can be more easily consumed by this big community online.”

Also speaking on the earnings call, Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, said that video is an attractive tool for marketers using Facebook and that more than 1.5 million small businesses posted video – including video ads and “organic videos” – on Facebook in September alone.

“Video is a natural and growing part of our mobile News Feed experience. Video on Facebook gives marketers not just mass reach, but better cross-device targeting and measurement than we believe is available on any other platform,” said Sandberg.