YouTube Is Losing The Battle For Online Video
But where has it all gone wrong?
YouTube is losing its grip on the market it pioneered. Recent changes and mistakes have opened the door to the likes of Facebook who now pose a very significant threat to the space they created….. In the next 6 minutes, you will find out why.
Ever since the first YouTube video, titled “Me at the zoo” by YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo was uploaded on April 23, 2005, YouTube became the platform synonymous with online video.
YouTube was the first mainstream place you could upload video, connecting people all over the world and created communities around different stuff, developed a new industry of independent broadcasters, making the phrase ‘viral’ popular in digital culture but this will not be enough to continue their decade long reign at the forefront of social video.
YouTube have had it their own way for a long time and haven’t really provided much in the way of innovation in recent years so it is about time some of these other social media powerhouses stepped up to the plate.
Over a decade has passed since Facebook launched without them making a play to challenge YouTube, until now.
It’s All About Timing
Where YouTube Is Getting It Wrong
Everything is not as rosy as it seems for the online video juggernaut, fundamental changes to the platform have left a passionate community of creators and users feeling disillusioned with the platform they use everyday in their millions.
“their inability to keep innovating and recent platform changes infuriating users and creators alike”
And perhaps an even more dangerous threat lies with YouTube’s main competitors such as Twitter, Facebook and even Snapchat. The platform has been potentially placing more emphasis on its commercial models and not on its creators and users. A series of high-profile and eyebrow raising decisions have happened recently:
- A mistimed and ill thought out move to integrate Google+ and YouTube changed the ecosystem of YouTube and totally disrupted the established use of comments
- The new autoplay feature in some weird attempt to boost video views, removing the ability for channels to show their subscribers which videos they have liked and many other counter intuitive changes which have damaged their ecosystem.
- The platforms struggle adopting to a mobile first website, only just recently releasing mobile friendly annotations
- Commercial decisions which have impeded creators collaborations with brands, reducing their potential income.
As a new industry explodes, a clear leader in the space emerges, think search, Google, think music streaming, Spotify, think need a driver, Uber. Yet even with its latest questionable moves, YouTube is unquestionably still sitting atop the online video throne. Nevertheless, their inability to keep innovating and recent platform changes infuriating users and creators alike, has coincided with the first bona fide challengers to the heavyweights title.
A New Dawn
Facebook is about to dominate social video
The power of Facebook is well understood, some months the social network is responsible for a quarter of the total visits websites around the web received. It was reported in 2012 that Facebook users consumed 500 years of YouTube video on the platform every day, at a time when YouTube were enjoying 4 billion daily views.
Fast forward to 2014, Facebook were boasting a billion video views a day, a figure that can only have grown since with views from May to July helping a 50% growth, partly down to campaigns such as the ice bucket challenge. The gap in statistics is shortening.
YouTube have never really done enough to help brands understand the important role of subscribers
Facebook have recently placed a major focus on video, after declaring war on Google Search back in 2013, 2015 battle will be for online video. Facebook have the power to prioritise video in over a billion timelines, which they are reportedly doing.
Facebook native video plays instantly in-stream, many factors combined are driving huge numbers of views on Facebook video, whilst YouTube videos are displaying on Facebook in a gradually worse fashion.
YouTube have never really done enough to help brands understand the important role of subscribers or supported them in growing a community around their content.What has happened in reality is that brands have just used YouTube as a dumping ground for video they have produced for some other reason to get no views, and gather dust.
Facebook have been smart, using agencies to spend their brand clients advertising dollars driving up ‘likes’, a KPI that is well understood, the ROI easily explained to the client. Now they are posed to repeat the trick with video, one metric which is heavily sought after on YouTube is the view count, and Facebook know it.
Twitter Are In The Fight
Native video, Vine, Periscope….
Let’s not forget Twitter, which is giving preference, more through design rather than an algorithm, by placing the video in a “card” — although, (at the time of writing) Twitter haven’t yet rolled out video.twitter.com to general users, only those with the elusive blue tick have access.
Twitter enabling some users to upload videos, alongside being able to publish straight from your phone’s camera on the app has opened up new possibilities for its users. And a statement of intent for their future move into video, once it is rolled out to all users it could see huge usage.
Educating potential users on how your products work are integral to adoption, Twitter excel at this part of their business in our opinion. Educating and building strong relations with news and media, this could see them become the default video platform for a massive industry with huge marketing budgets.
The new native video is part of a three pronged attack on video, alongside the recently acquired instant streaming service Periscope, and 6 second video sharing site Vine, allowing power users products for different forms of the video medium.
The Stats Don’t Look Good
Further evidence
Statistics provided by SocialBakers recently show that Facebook have now overtaken all other channels in terms of video shares — a function which is built into the core functionality of Facebook. It is therefore no wonder at the time that auto play videos were fully rolled out we saw this shift in video sharing.
Not only does Facebook and Twitter drive up the numbers of views on YouTube videos, the ease of embedding a YouTube video on any site is incredibly important for the platforms distribution. The design of both Facebook and Twitter’s embed allows you to show the video in a seamless and beautiful way — big news for people who like to embed video, but extremely bad news for YouTube.
The evidence is clear, YouTube can respond, but the enormous referral traffic generated from the internet is at risk and their position as default online video channel is under full assault.
One thing is certain, it is an epic time to be a creator. Hardware and software are bringing down the barrier to entry and an individuals ability to enter the creative marketplace is easier than ever before. We just need to wrestle away the power from advertisers now, but that is a story for another day.
Written by: Ben White and Steven Cole
