I watched 24 hours worth of Facebook Watch, to try to understand how it works.
The question.
“Are people going to put in their earbuds to open their FB app on their phone?”
In the weeks since Facebook Watch has rolled out, this question has dominated my conversations with fellow videoheads, when considering Facebook’s very direct move into longer form internet video. Can Facebook (the company) change its users’ intentions when they open up Facebook (the app or the website)?
By contrast, when humans of earth pull out their phones and open the YouTube app, they want to watch videos. When they open Spotify, they want to listen to music. When they open Instagram, they (mostly) want to look at visual things from their friends and from accounts they like. When humans open up their Facebook app, it’s less clear to me what they want to do.
In the simplest terms, I would describe the intention as “getting an update on our world.” When I click through to my newsfeed, usually out of habitual instinct, what I get now is: articles friends have shared, articles or videos from publishers I follow, and the occasional big life update from friends (i.e. I’m engaged, I’m married, I’m divorced, I’m moving, I’m sober, look at this cool thing I bought, etc…), with fewer casual updates from fewer people. It’s a peek into the world.
As a caveat, I should mention I don’t really know if that’s why EVERYONE is logging on to FB. Facebook has 2 billion users in every demographic and market — and those users engage with the platform differently. But at this point in FB’s history, you can definitively say, people are not logging on to watch TV shows. That just hasn’t been in the mix. But the Watch tab, along with the billion dollars FB is committing to spend on content, is a very blatant attempt to change that intention.
With this launch I wanted to see what the platform looks like in its first month, to test the user experience (on both mobile and desktop), to watch the videos publishers and creators are producing and posting, and to consider what kind of platform Watch might become. So, I decided I would watch a full 24 hours worth of Facebook Watch content, over about a week, to figure out what might work and what seems weird, at least, so far.
The process.
To see exactly what I watched you can check out the spreadsheet where I tracked the videos as well as my observations I tried to keep the judgements mostly conceptual — there’s stuff I watched where I’m so clearly not the intended audience. For me to say whether I liked Good Morning America’s Lillian Babaian vs. Taye Hansberry episode of “Closet Raiders” wouldn’t be especially helpful. But I tried to keep track of whether I thought any particular video would be effective on the platform, and what was interesting about it.
A thing about everything on the Watch tab is every video has been categorized as an “episode” within a “show.” Meaning when NowThis News posts Who Is Stephen Miller? (garnering 1.4mm views and 13k shares), it is collected on their “Who Is?” show page. Even though the video was previously posted on NowThis Politics, where it got 4.5mm views and 45k shares. There’s no standalone videos that I could find in the Watch tab, either on mobile or desktop, which is weird and we will talk about more. So in tracking these, I kept track of the show, the publisher, the episode, the length, the views and the shares
I watched a total of 162 “shows,” with an average run time of 8.9 minutes. While watching the videos, I tried to put myself in the shoes of a person who would actually watch the entire video, and made it my goal to get through the whole video without skipping ahead — but there were a few instances where I got that old online feeling of “yeah, I get it” -ness, and for those I did click to the next video before the previous one had ended.. I also didn’t watch any of the videos that were well over an hour, of which you’ll find some, either live sports, videos of podcast conversations, or like, 3 hours of a radio show. The reason I didn’t watch these is, well, I really didn’t want to. But also, seeing how few views these samples were getting, it didn’t feel necessary to devote an 1/8th of the time of the experiment to checking them out. It’s not yet a real use-case for the platform.
This is mostly a qualitative experiment — the 24 hours is arbitrary. And you might be thinking that I could have just easily said “I watched a bunch of Facebook Watch and this is what I think,” but I found giving myself the goal of 24 hours super useful because it really forced me to watch a lot of things I wouldn’t normally watch, and to watch them to to end.
Some observations on various “shows” on the platform.
I collected a bunch of examples of shows that felt representative of what’s on the platform, and stuff that I just loved generally. There’s less refined notes in the spreadsheet. There’s also some broad thoughts about a few categories I thought were especially weak from a content and performance standpoint, but that I didn’t feel like calling out by name. Here we go.
The personality-based forms.
I personally loved Help Helen Smash , these 2 minute clips by comedian Laura Clery, who puts a weird effect on her face, mixes it with a dumb voice and dumber jokes. The character is fun, and there’s a thruline, even though it’s not episodic and episodes don’t need to be watched in sequence. And some videos have quite a few shares. I think there’s something to this approach for FB, a performer doing a thing and occasionally brings in new fans through viral hits, but will have people who want to watch every clip. And it’s decidedly internetty.
On that same tip is Nas Daily, a former engineer at Venmo, who now travels the globe and makes a 1-minute video a day about all kinds of things. I’d read about Nas in the press on Watch, but hadn’t checked his videos out until starting this experiment. He’s really infectious as a vlogger, his videos have a Vimeo-shot-on-drone aesthetic, which, when mixed with the quick cuts and Youtuber-on-stage-at-Vidcon positivity, feels really new and fresh. And everything seems to perform ok — in the hundreds of thousands — with occasional breakout hits. I love this approach because it’s truly about building and growing affinity. And it’s a form that’s native to FB.
The big budget, unscripted TV.
Ball in the Family, the reality show about the family of NBA rookie Lonzo Ball, is a solidly produced docu-follow show with around 20 minutes of run time each episode. The series has been commonly cited by press about FB’s investment in Watch. The first episode has a massive 8mm views, 50k shares, with a significant drop for the second episode. I clicked through to see what people were saying when they shared. The folks that shared it generally were saying, “I love this family, or I love this show.” More than almost anything else on Watch, this show feels verry much feels like TV. I would be SOOOO curious to see the watch time.
Other clips that fit into this are actual TV personalities bringing their approach and content to FB. Mike Rowe’s Returning the Favor, which was originally produced for FB Watch, and Cake Boss: Outrageous Cakes, which seems to be repurposing old episodes of TLC’s Cake Boss for FB. They’re strong pieces of content that seem to be performing well, because each ep is generally really novel (read:shareable). But, with these 10 minute plus pieces of content, knowing how long people watched for would be very revealing.
The “shows” that are really just formats.
The first video I watched from Comeback Kids: Animal Edition, Dog Who Lost Her Legs Was Determined To Walk Again, was the most shared video I saw in the 24 hour experiment with 300k shares and 17mm views. The documentary segment was about, you guessed it, a dog who lost it’s legs, but was determined to walk again and it’s a form that’s guaranteed to be sharable. A cute animal overcoming adversity is a recipe that publishers like The Dodo have perfected over the last couple of years. But it didn’t feel like a “show,” It’s a format around a subject, which is a pretty smart strategy (for the time being). Every episode is viral and will likely perform. But it does beg the question as to whether this is actually a show or something else? Do users click “follow” because they want more videos like this, or because THEY have to see the next episode? Or will they be content to only see the most viral episodes in their regular newsfeeds? It will be interesting to see.
Another example of this approach is Weird Wild World by Nameless TV, which has 3–5 minute videos that feel like news packages on super viral stories like The Girl Who Lives in a Bowl or 73 Year Old Grandma Teaches Sword Fighting. They’ve got a lot of followers for their show page and will likely keep getting viral hits off it.
The “shows” that are really just channels.
In a similar vein to the last category, The Fine Brothers did a fascinating thing. They started a show page that was just called “Fine Brothers Entertainment”, which basically mirrors the content on their YouTube channel, but doesn’t subdivide their well-established forms into shows. The most successful one I saw was KIDS REACT TO AVENGED SEVENFOLD (Metal Band), which likely was mega shared by Avenged Sevenfold fans (and is pretty fun!).
I had to stop myself from watching too much Best of the NBA, a channel tailored to my interests. Their long-playing videos didn’t get crazy shares, but the views on many were in the millions, which points to the possibility that FB knows exactly who to suggest these videos to and those users are likely watching the shit out of these highlight clips, which can be 10 or 20 minutes in run time.
The NowThis Home Run. And another one.
Apocalypse NowThis by NowThis News is another early, effective show, with both episodes garnering views in the hundreds of thousands. It’s kind of got everything I would think publishers would want in a show: a likeable recurring host, a format and title that explains exactly what the show is, and a subject matter that has lots of different directions you can go, many of which will be shareable as a kind of PSA to your friends. One week it’s, “we’re all gonna die by Nuclear holocaust.” the next it’s “we’re all gonna die by global warming.” Clever.
Contrast that with NowThis’ Who Is?, which felt less like a show and more like a format, albeit an addictively shareable one. Each episode has a different celebrity going internet-explainer on the likes of Joe Arpaio or Stephen Miller. They’re all well-produced and perform well. But yeah, I don’t know if it’s a show, per se. Just because I watched one, do I want to watch the next one? Do I need to? Maybe/maybe not.
The less big-budget unscripted internet games shows:
Some of the other things that you could call hits are shows that feel specifically produced for the internet, Bae or Bail by A&E, is a prank show that has had a couple massive episodes. I suspect it will live or die by how novel each prank is, with the most out there(like this funeral episode) getting the “holy shit can you believe this lol”-share.
Virtually Dating from Conde Nast also did impressive numbers by being a clean idea (people date in VR) and then delivering. My assumption has always been that dating shows thrive on being voyeuristic, and this show delivers the intimacy and humor of meeting someone new in a novel package.
In a similar vein, Make Up or Break Up is a well-produced, live kind of talk show, produced by Facebook,. It takes a couple, gets them to talk about their problems, then asks the audience that titular question. It’s formally a really interesting experiment, because while the show is fun after the fact, it’s much better for the audience to catch live so they can comment in real time and vote. The first episode didn’t do crazy numbers (300k views, 300 shares), but will be interesting to see if it can drive tune-in by the end of it’s run.
The Long Form Scripted
One of my favorite things I saw was published by Refinery29, a scripted show called Strangers, by Filmmaker Lia Madofsky. Each episode is 15 to 20 minutes, and while the first one did decent numbers, subsequent episodes have seen diminishing returns. It reminds me a lot of High Maintenance in form and style, which was a hit on Vimeo before being developed into a HBO show. I think long-form scripted is going to have an uphill battle on FB Watch (it’s not exactly the premier form on other internet platforms either), But Lia’s a real talent, it’s well cast and honest and beautiful and will likely be more of a development project for the folks involved than a hit, that will eventually wind up on a more traditional TVish platform in a higher production value form. Just a prediction. Like the lovesick character Isobel (played by the very talented Zoe Chao), I hope Strangers finds its people, though.
I also checked out a couple episodes of Loosely Exactly Nicole, which made news because it’s first season was on MTV and has now migrated to be internet only. Even though the show in no way has a 34-year old white dude in mind as an audience, I thought it was charming. Like Strangers, the numbers are not great after the pilot.
Odds and Ends.
One of the most fascinating “hits” on the platform so far has been the Humans of New York Series, which so far has launched four 20-minute episodes, culled from thousands of hours of beautifully shot interviews that are a highly intimate documents of the people of the city (much like the original photo blog). Each episode has more than 20k shares, and they are loosely based around a 1-word theme. I personally liked each episode I watched, though my attention waned by the midpoint. But the thing I like about this show is that it feels very much like a new form, and it’s resonating with folks.
Then, there’s a content category I didn’t really dive into because frankly, I don’t care about soccer that much, but Live Sports seems to be a really interesting bet that’s incorporated into the Watch platform. Nothing I noticed had been a major hit so far, but there were a ton of games and competitions in the “10 Minutes or More” Section. f FB can build a practice in users where it sucks people into live games via the Newsfeed, that would be an amazing change in sports-viewing behavior.
The Live Podcast or Interview show
Another thing that there’s a lot of is videos of podcast conversations. I clicked into quite a few, but the only one I watched in whole was the Caitlyn Jenner episode of Norm Macdonald Live, which wasn’t actually broadcast Live on Facebook. This clip did 8000 views on FB, a fraction of the 230,000 views it did on YouTube. And unclear how many downloads it got as a podcast. I suspect it will be a little while before hour-plus conversation shows become a high-performing format in FB, though making use of Live functionality might help.
Shows that are just ported over from other platforms.
There’s a lot of things on here that feel like they were made for someone else, be it aforementioned Cake Boss clips, or literal YouTube series like Hot Ones. College Humor’s I want my phone back was originally produced exclusively for Comcast’s not-very watched platform Watchable. It’s a fun, unpredictable format, in which the host stops people on the street to ask if she can have their phone and send embarrassing texts or make dumb social posts, for money. I personally have an affinity for unscripted shows that let the seams show in how they’re made and this one definitely does that.
Shows that are just “SCTV.”
As I said in the intro to this section, there’s plenty of shows that represent my least favorite internet video form, what I call “Shittier, Cheaper TV,” or SCTV for short. If you work in this field, you’ve likely found yourself watching a good amount of this kind of content, which often doesn’t clock views or seem to know what it is. I’ll say, I’ve made some videos that could match this characterization. I don’t knock publishers that do it: oftentimes, it’s made by talented passionate people, so I won’t call them out here. It does remind me of when YouTube, back in 2012, spent 100 million on new channels from publishers. And during that period, the things that were most successful were often things that were as far away from SCTV as possible.
Notes on the platform itself.
No vidbro is going to use FB Watch and not compare it to YouTube. As reporter Casey Newton wrote in an excellent piece for The Verge last month, YouTube has gotten REALLY good at recommending users related videos and keeping people engaged for hours. Facebook has not done this yet, likely in part because it doesn’t know what kind of videos I want to watch yet. But the autoplay of new videos on Watch was often SOOOO unrelated, and regularly played me videos I had already seen. Same goes for the suggested tab. I found myself more often than not clicking back to the Watch landing page to find new videos to watch. So discovery will need work, but algorithmic recommendation is the kind of thing you can expect Facebook to improve upon.
The organization of videos as part of shows is an interesting strategy — it doesn’t allow for publishers to make a clear distinction as to what you’re signing up for when you click “follow,” whether it’s actually an episodic series or just a loosely branded format. And it limits the ability of publishers to experiment with new things, because you have to commit to a new format being a “show” and starting a page for it.
But the tabs on the Watch page make sense: I can click through to watch things that are popular, things that FB is trying to promote and things my friends are watching. I assume the landing page experience will get better and better. And the more shows people follow, it will be exciting to see what wind up getting a built in boost for new episodes. I don’t quite get the need for a “10 Minutes Or More” section, which doesn’t seem to line up with how users think. When have you ever said to yourself, “you know, I’d like to watch 10 minutes or more of a video”? Likely, never. But as the section deepens, it will be a good way to showcase the newer long-form content coming to FB.
There’s a lot of things on the platform that aren’t typically what you’d expect to be an effective video for Facebook pre launch of Watch: high production value, TV-style programming. They require immersion, where the most successful FB video (of late) has been highly shareable, audio-optional and often ephemeral. I think the more video they fill the platform with, the more likely people will be ready to opt into these big budget projects.
So is Facebook Watch going to work?
Yes. But maybe not how Facebook expects. A thing to keep in mind when Facebook makes a really big move like this isthey don’t necessarily know what’s going to happen. When they introduced video in 2014 (and throttled the amount of shares any YouTube video could get on the platform), I don’t think they said, “In 2 years, there will be BILLIONS of views for text-driven, audio-optional, 60-second viral food videos.” (If anyone DID say that, then hats off to you.)
When FB poured money into Live last year, I believe they were expecting, like, live TV shows. But the hits turned out to be shareable, novel stunts and real time reporting. Publishers and creators are going to test, learn and iterate to figure out what works on the Watch tab.
Facebook is a massive platform run, by sharp, dedicated people. They hold huge sway over the media industry in ways unimaginable 10 years ago. When they expend their resources to try to add something to their ecosystem, it generally has a huge effect. So I think the opportunity for my fellow vidbros is to read the waves of the platform, and innovate.
Personally, I’m most excited for the Nas’s and Help Helen Smashs and Humans of New Yorks of the platform. The forms that feel exciting and new and native to Facebook Watch will be the ones to (ahem) watch. I get the desire on Facebook to fill the platform with higher-end TV style content, but I suspect there will be more dynamism and audience affinity for the things that feel new.
Which leads to another final question, will Facebook Watch be like TV or will it be like YouTube? It’s gonna be a challenge to be either, and likely super difficult to be both. But the answer is going to come from the content — what plays well, what inspires new forms and what causes FB users to start putting in their earbuds when they open the app. It’s already an exciting time to make online video and FB is going to be a really fun platform to focus on.
