According to the latest Nielsen research, Facebook is now the third most popular place to watch video online in the world! Of course, YouTube is still dominant, but Facebook’s rapid growth is worth noting.
According to Nielsen’s latest VideoCensus numbers, which look at the number of video views in October, YouTube serviced over 6.6 billion streams. In a distant second, Hulu offered up over 632 million video streams. But it was Facebook with over 217 million streams in October that easily beat out Bing, Yahoo, and several other online sites. In September, Facebook was ranked tenth in total streams.
Also interesting, Nielsen says the amount of time social media users are spending on video is up 98% year-to-year. But have TV newsrooms taken notice? One of the most popular local TV news pages I’ve seen on Facebook is that of WPTV in West Palm Beach, Florida. With it’s 5,600+ fans, it regularly features meaty posts and good community-building interaction. But a recent check of the page found just one video post. Even the links back to the station’s Web site seemed to favor slideshows (for more hits?) and text stories.
It may be that TV newsrooms are still unsure about the value of sharing their video freely. (For more thoughts on this topic, read our previous post Online video for TV journalists.) It seems to me, though, that this is another area of opportunity for news organizations to disseminate content to expanded audiences.
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