Dive Brief:
- In comments made at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women International Summit in London, Nicola Mendelsohn, Facebook’s VP for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, predicted that the social media platform "will be definitely mobile” and “probably all video” in five years.
- Mendelsohn didn’t provide user stats, but did say that Facebook users are posting fewer text updates to their timelines and uploading more rich media.
- Facebook earns a large majority of its advertising revenue from its mobile app, and has made a serious push into video over the last year, including changing its algorithm to favor video in users’ timelines and adding new features such as Facebook Live streaming video.
Dive Insight:
Facebook claims 500 million users watch video on the platform daily and time spent on video is 100 million hours daily on the 10 billion video views served on Facebook each day.
But as marketers know, a video is counted as “viewed” on Facebook even if it might not have been watched, since Facebook defaults to autoplay video with the sound off on users’ timelines. According to recent story by Digiday, a number of content providers have warned that many of their videos are being viewed with the sound off. LittleThings, which boasts 150 million average monthly video views on Facebook, and Mic, which also averages 150 million average monthly video views, report that around 85% of their views happen with the sound turned off.
Still, Facebook appears bullish on video, and Mendelsohn says the platform is seeing a decline in text, something reinforced by the increasingly mainstream use of emojis, images, GIFs, videos and other rich media on social platforms.
“If we look already, we’re seeing a year-on-year decline on text," Mendelsohn said. "We’re seeing a massive increase, as I’ve said, of both pictures and video. So I think, yeah, if I was having a bet, I would say … video, video, video.”
Mendelsohn said she believes video is a better way to tell stories and predicted that 360 degree video will move beyond its current novelty status.
