Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly “obsessed” with livestreaming, and is directing a substantial amount of the social media giant’s resources to building the Facebook Live product. Facebook already gets more than 8 billion video views every day, a “view” being defined as anything longer than 3 seconds, but engineers are tweaking algorithms to push videos even higher in users’ news feeds, especially popular ones, or those especially newsworthy. Live feed is especially attractive.
Live video rolled out to all users in December after beta-testing with celebrities such as live reporting by Univision anchor Jorge Ramos. As of this week, live video is being given higher news feed ranking than pre-recorded, and the live format will soon be made a separate content type.
A blog post from from Facebook that announced the change said,”As a first step, we are making a small update to News Feed so that Facebook Live videos are more likely to appear higher in News Feed when those videos are actually live, compared to after they are no longer live. People spend more than 3x more time watching a Facebook Live video on average compared to a video that’s no longer live.”
Obviously, the goal is to keep users on the Facebook site longer so that their value with advertisers rises. However, it appears that the future of the news feed may be more like TV than a newspaper. The company has spent a lot of resources trying to become the go-to place for what’s happening right now, and has been aggressive over the past year in moving into video.
Livestreaming is a priority at Twitter as well, but the strategic difference at this point is that Facebook has built Live into its main app, rather than as a standalone product. In addition, Facebook has so many users that it has a huge competitive advantage in the video news realm. Zuckerberg once described Facebook’s goal as making the news feed “the best personalized newspaper.” It may soon be newspaper and live TV all rolled into one.
Live stream video is somewhat hidden under the status icon on mobile devices. However, once the user goes to update their status there is a new icon that leads to the function.