Cat fight: Watch out YouTube, here comes Facebook I may not be the best person to write this. I am, after all, a YouTube refugee. Or renegade. Or reject. Roughly eight years ago YouTube booted me for posting a 20-second video I took at an Arsenal soccer match. While I have apparently been granted a recent pardon (I can upload again!), my criminal status has kept me from using …
I came here to say this. Also, what is with the volume obnoxiously starting at maximum ALL the time, and at least 60% of the videos being vertical? Till they fix those issues, farcebook video won't hold a candle to youtube, which despite the overwhelming amount of crap, also has some jewels of educational content, made with love and dedication by people who care about their subject.
Yes, sometimes the subject is cats, minecraft, unboxing of disney stuff, but other channels cover vintage electronics, modern electronics, engineering, chemistry, physics, astronomy, you name it. Much of it professionally created.
I think there is a big difference.
I use Facebook to connect with friends, as an addition to tools like phone calls, texts, whatsapp, and the good old-fashioned face-to-face meeting (usually for several pints in a drinking establishment). If I do something and would like to share information about that with my friends, I will use Facebook as one of the methods. Pics, Videos and descriptions of events in my life others may find interesting. This is social networking, and where such content belongs.
Youtube, however, is generally a public medium. Many people seem to flood it with stuff which is only (or should only be) of interest to their friends and family. This is similar to Twitter, an entirely public forum mostly filled with personal content...
So my view would be that the world would be a better place if personal stuff was confined to Facebook, and Youtube and Twitter were used only for content you want the whole world to see. The quality of content on Youtube would go up, giving them a chance to make a profit.
>Facebook just needs more users spending more time on its site
WRONG!
FB needs ad-impressions and click-throughs. If you stay in one place watching user-generated content, that will suck their bandwidth without increasing ad revenue.
The destination model is different. FB is for "content about friend X" whereas YouTube content is about things, which are more targeted/target-able in terms of market data.
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The only reason FB video stats are up is 'cos they autoplay as you scroll down your feed.
Are you saying the facebook has videos? I wonder why I don't see them on the very few occasions I go there to check up on a forum there. Maybe having a lot of junk blocked is the reason.
I'm also a little curious about how the YouTube figures are broken down by category. In my experience guessing from the title doesn't always match my expectations of what's in the video.
Good point from the article that "being down wit da yoof" is a fairly pointless exercise as in general they haven't got a lot of money and while some advertising might pay off in the long run, people grow up, tastes change and kids forget ads they've seen very quickly.
http://www.fbpurity.com/ Sorted.
Chuck NoScript, Adblock Plus and Privacy Badger in while you're at it. :)
Weirdly enough, I think YT is actually on the right track for the Long Run, whereas FB will inevitably die sooner, but probably later.
Besides the stream of inane cat vids, gaming streams and look-at-me vloggers, there's an increasing amount of actually useful and solid material on YT that will eventualy form the backbone of the business. There's copyrighted stuff in the form of old documentaries, which can be found on-demand instead of hoping there's an interest channel somewhere in your TV package that airs them. But also a growing amount of How-To instruction vids by companies, professionals, and amateurs that are really, really useful.
This stuff takes way more time to produce than your average cat-vid, so the influx is much lower, but quite steady. And it's getting to the point where it's getting the critical mass of a solid library. Not unlike Wikipedia, where it took a number of years to build up past the Trivia and collect a solid base of actually useful articles which are mostly correct on most things, like its paper predecessors.
Silently and stealthily, YT is becoming a staple source of information, hidden under the white noise of the fluff and shizzle, and that's what's ultimately going to ensure its long-term existence. It's becoming more solid by the day, whereas FB, by its nature, is much more ephemeral.
Facebooks media offering is horseshit. As much as YouTube has tried its hardest to vandalise the site over the last two years Facebook is 1% of what YouTube is. And as a person who watches a lot of gaming coverage (sc2 gel/sl/iem/wcs) sips, totalbiscuit, angryjoe and, Jim sterling mostly) I can say if you buy games without extensive YouTube viewing you probably have a lot of regrets and I definitely have a lot more disposable income than your spawn. Condescending to the last.
In my opinion, one of the most basic problems with YouTube is that it's just not a good user experience.
I end up "on YouTube" mostly from links from other sources that have posted/curated/promoted a video that just happens to be using YouTube as the distribution means for their content. Or I use YouTube to upload a video that I post elsewhere. I need to link to it from elsewhere on the web for anyone to find it.
YouTube just isn't something that I go to directly. There's just too much noise and abysmally poor content sorting and presentation. Funny isn't it? An advertising company that is known for search engine prowess and thorough profiling and analysis of users of its services...can't figure out what videos people want to watch?
Entire corporations have been brought down by indulging orgies of online video viewing (like U.S. retailer J.C. Penney).
I used to work at one of JC Penney's store support centers and knew right away that any such video viewing habits as described in the linked, hyperbole-laden article would have to have been indulged in by home office denizens. People in the stores and support centers are too busy working to have time for all that. It would explain the kinds of decisions we got from Plano, though.
It comes off sounding like yotube is a standalone operation not owned/operated by google. It says facebook videos are a loss leader for facebook's massive advertising, isn't most of google's products loss leaders for their advertising? It seems as if google made about 45 billion in advertising revenue for the first 3 Qs of 2015(https://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html). I don't think they are losing any sleep at night.
I don't use facebook, maybe I watch on average a dozen youtube videos a month or something. 98% of my video entertainment comes from cable tv curated by my tivo season passes and wishlists(same as it has been for the past 15 years).
Where's the pinch of salt icon?
This is just another of Matt Asay's bits of fluff either for the company he's currently with or for one of his friends: high on opinion, low on fact.
Most YouTube content is shit but for some time now people have been making real money on it. With the move to mobile it also provides much more data about users than when it was just on the web: most users are now logged in and actively engaged. An increasing number of people do use YouTube to consume content like they used to watch TV and this is bringing content and advertisers to the platform. But YouTube also excels at the technology: the technology needed to do all that transcoding, hosting and delivery is simply staggering and one of the reasons why so many media companies rely on YouTube to host trailers in increasingly high resolution. YouTube might well continue to build on those partnerships in, albeit uneasy, exclusive one-offs, particularly of live events.
But a more fundamental critique of the article: just as Facebook doesn't need to make money with video, neither does Alphabet. Page and Brin have made it abundantly clear that they're not interested in quick profits and they control the company. Besides the running costs of the platforms pale in comparison with some of the acquisitions: just think how much Facebook has spunked on WhatsApp, Oculus and Instagram. Alphabet has at least been buying physical product.
Video entitled "How Facebook is Stealing Billions of Views"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7tA3NNKF0Q
And how Facebook is basically just a doughnut stealing mobster:
http://www.sheldoncomics.com/archive/150128.html
Given how our society rewards psychopaths and sociopaths with immense wealth, I'm not surprised Facebook is so rich.
To access most FB video, one must be a user. With YT, one does not need an account to view videos. Thus to FB, videos are an enhancement while for YT they are the only reason for its existence. However, both suffer from eyeball competition from other sites (Netflix, Hulu, etc.) and activities.
Horse Doings. Amazon are zero profit primarily because they want market share - all of it. YouTube similar scenario - market share first, money later. Doesn't matter how much later either, evidence is shareholders will wait.
Just take a look at other "free" things Google has offered in the past - Froogle for example was free for many years. Google spotted the point at which merchants were so heavily reliant on it they'd pay for it and THEN started charging for it.
Youtube needs to tidy up and remove dud content, it annoys viewers and wastes bandwidth. Simply let viewers start blocking undesirable uploaders, those whose only capability is producing a catchy title with shitty content.
Enough blocks and simply drop the uploader and their content, tidy stuff up, get end users to better user generated content and registered because that registration has real value, Registered users are of far greater value than anonymous users and there must be value for them to register, the value of avoiding crappy up loaders who waste storage space and bandwidth (worst examples, those advertising content sites with 90 minute long fixed frame images, a huge waste of storage).
Start cleaning things up and likely Youtube could halve storage requirements, way too many fixed frame pictures pretending to be video. So registered user generated filtering to reduce wasted storage and bandwidth in order to increase profitability and retain viewers with less annoying content driving them away.
Should also analyse for repeated content and only store it once with links to it for other users (Megaupload did a good job of this and it was largely automated).
... I will go to youtube and search / view it on there. Why? Because even the "HD" quality streams from Facebook are blocky - whereas youtube's streams are pretty damn good quality.
Plus a lot of facebook videos are stolen from youtube, and simply overlaid with some facebook page's name. So they'll rack up millions of views for content they didn't create, meanwhile the actual creator on youtube is getting bugger all recognition for it.
I know this is basically how youtube worked in the beginning, with users copyright infringing tons of stuff from film studios etc... but I think it's different when it's an indie creator.
OK, this is a very old article which is possibly why El Reg is pushing it, but I have only one thing to add that could work in Facebook's favour. Anyone using YouTube, especially recently, will be aware of a particular hashtag and the fact that users are looking for ways out of the mire that is the current copyright claiming system being abused by corporations and their lackeys.
Anyone that is interested needs to watch this video, then perhaps you too will ask "Where's The Fair Use".
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