Videos on Facebook now have more than four billion views a day

Facebook believes video content is the key to the company’s future, that much has already been made clear, but now it has the numbers to back that up. In its most recent earnings call, the company revealed that the videos on its social network pull in more than four billion views every day, around 75% of which comes from mobile devices. Considering how videos on Facebook play automatically, those numbers are a bit inflated, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that Facebook is actually becoming a serious YouTube competitor. 

Facebook products have a tendency to grow, and grow quickly. Video doesn’t appear to be an exception. The social network announced on its Q1 earnings call Wednesday that it now serves up four billion video views to its user base every single day, up from three billion in January and just one billion back in September. Of those four billion views, 75 percent come from mobile devices, according to COO Sheryl Sandberg. Facebook videos play automatically, which certainly helps to juice the total-views metric, but going from one billion to four billion total views per day in a little over six months is one of the reasons people now consider Facebook as a bona fide YouTube competitor. What’s still missing from that competition is a video ad push from Facebook that’s likely on the horizon. “We’ve always believed that the format of our ads should follow the format of what consumers are doing on Facebook,” Sandberg added on the investors call. “The fact that there’s so much consumer video, that gives us the opportunity to do more marketing video as well.” But Sandberg followed up with the “it’s still early days” caveat, and Facebook didn’t break out its video ad revenue (we knew that they wouldn’t).