Hi, my name is Matt Pakes and I’m a product manager at Facebook, responsible for video products. First, I want to be clear that we (and I) absolutely do care about digital video creators. We also care about the people who watch videos on Facebook, as well as advertisers. Our goal is to build and support products for video creators and to create a sustainable video ecosystem that works well for everyone. To that end, I’d like to address your concerns.

With regard to the reach of video posts, the goal of Facebook’s News Feed is to show the right content to the right people at the right time. If you’re the type of person who likes to watch videos, you should be seeing more videos in your News Feed. If you tend to skip over videos, you will likely see less of them. Over years of developing and tuning News Feed, we know that clicking on a link to play video is not a great user experience, so people tend to interact slightly less with non-native video, and the posts get less engagement. Native video posts with auto-play tend to see better engagement, more watch time and higher view counts. It’s a nuanced but important point: native videos often do better than video links, but this is because people tend to prefer watching native videos over clicking on a link and waiting for something to load.

Now, in looking at view counts, every measurement option comes with tradeoffs. The ‘knee in the watch time curve’ for a 10 minute digital episode is going to be quite different than the one for a 6-second Vine video. While there is no broad industry standard for view measurement, three seconds is one common choice, and gives us a consistent metric for all video on Facebook. If you have stayed on a video for at least three seconds, it signals to us that you are not simply scrolling through feed and you’ve shown intent to watch that video. However, we also provide detailed metrics and tools to help Pages better understand how people respond to their videos on Facebook. So, if a Page owner wants to see exactly how long people watch their videos, they can easily see that data without having to rely solely on the public view count.

Finally, we take intellectual property rights very seriously. We have used the Audible Magic system for years to help prevent unauthorized video content on Facebook. We also provide reporting tools for content owners to report possible copyright infringement. As video continues to grow rapidly on Facebook, we’re actively exploring further solutions to help IP owners identify and manage potential infringing content, tailored for our unique platform and ecosystem. This is a significant technical challenge at our scale, but we have a team working on it and expect to have more to share later this summer.

We absolutely hear your concerns and deeply care about the experience for video creators on Facebook, as well as the experience for people and advertisers. We’re listening to feedback, and will continue to improve our publishing tools and user experiences.