Google purchased YouTube several years ago and included it into its Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) accounts system and is benefitting from it ever since. It was a smart move from Google at the time as more and more people were shifting from T.V to YouTube and it derives a huge audience today. YouTube for a long time has been the only most popular site for brand advertisements and companies preferred to put their ads on YouTube videos. However, lately Facebook is also getting a lot of attention from the brand marketers. Facebook has introduced a video feature which is getting popular with every passing day.
A report from Ad Week declares Facebook is getting popular because of its feature to post and play videos. Many users are directly posting videos on Facebook these days instead of posting YouTube links. This new trend is a sign of concern for Google. Facebook has a huge market and it is the most popular social networking site available on the internet. This new trend of directly posting videos is definitely affecting the YouTube traffic.
The popularity of Google’s video site is slowly losing its audience to Facebook’s video feature and is taking away revenue from it as well. On top of that many companies prefer to place ads on Facebook rather than YouTube. Google is losing ad money because of the changing trend in the market of video advertising.
Robert Sandie, the CEO of online video tracker consultant praised Facebook’s initiative and said that this is the first step in gradually taking over video. Sandie also said that YouTube has always dominated the market in posting early looks at big games spots and therefore the arrival of Super Bowl XLIX on Feb 1st will show how serious Facebook is about its video feature. It will be a tough call for Facebook to keep audience hooked to its newsfeed rather than going to Google’s YouTube, but it very possible.
Social breaker, a social media tracker revealed that more and more brand marketers are getting attracted towards Facebook for their advertisements. McDonald’s posted around 27 videos on Facebook as per January’s report. However 18 of those videos were YouTube links but the remaining 9 were Facebook Inc. videos. The number however increased in September to 32 videos out of which 19 were Facebook videos. Similar trend was seen by the company Budweiser. Budweiser posted lesser Facebook Videos in January but in September the numbers were changed in favor of Facebook.
Facebook launched its AutoPlay video feature last year and it has become really popular now. While posting videos on the social networking site the users get an option of using the Facebook’s feature which plays the videos automatically. This feature works smoothly and is more convenient which is why users are shifting from YouTube links. However, Google’s YouTube is still very popular and is still preferred when it comes to watching complete videos or shows.
Google Inc.’s (NASDAQ:GOOGL) concerns of losing advertisement dollars and viewership is completely justified and the company will have to work with YouTube to bring something new and more attractive to the site.
