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Looks like the sleeping online video giant that is Facebook may finally have awoken. According to Nielsen’s latest VideoCensus numbers, Facebook jumped to No. 3 behind established video powerhouses YouTube (s GOOG) and Hulu in terms of total streams. That’s up from No. 10 just last month. Facebook generated more than 217 million streams in October to more than 31.5 million unique viewers, up from 110 million streams to 23 million viewers in September.
| Video Brand | Total Streams (000) | Unique Viewers (000) |
|---|---|---|
| YouTube | 6,632,964 | 105,923 |
| Hulu | 632,662 | 13,472 |
| 217,765 | 31,594 | |
| MSN/WindowsLive/Bing | 183,556 | 17,301 |
| Yahoo! | 173,482 | 24,265 |
| Fox Interactive Media | 160,698 | 13,142 |
| ABC Television | 136,348 | 5,642 |
| Turner Sports and Entertainment Digital Network | 119,850 | 5,741 |
| ESPN Digital Network | 109,799 | 8,625 |
| CBS Entertainment Network | 103,741 | 6,973 |
Source: Nielsen VideoCensus
Note: Includes progressive downloads and excludes video advertising
Facebook actually had more than double the number of unique viewers than Hulu had for October, though this isn’t too shocking given the nature of short, personal video sharing that goes on on Facebook versus the longer-form viewing that happens on Hulu. But the social network’s ascendancy should have the Hulu folks on alert. Facebook already got the early premiere of the NBC (and Hulu owner) show Community earlier this year, and Zuckerberg and Co. could flex their newfound video muscles to snatch even more premium content from the Hulu-gurus.
Overall, the number of total U.S. video watchers dipped slightly to 138.6 million unique viewers from 139.3 million in Sept., but the number of total streams was up to 11.2 billion in Oct. vs. 11.02 billion in Sept. The number of streams per person was up to 81 in Oct. vs. 79.1 in Sept., and the time spent per viewer was up to 212.5 minutes vs. 195.2 in Sept.
| Oct.-09 | |
| Unique Viewers (000) | 138,623 |
| Total Streams (000) | 11,226,935 |
| Streams per Viewer | 81.0 |
| Time per Viewer (min) | 212.5 |
Source: Nielsen VideoCensus
Note: Includes progressive downloads and excludes video advertising
Hey nice post, in no time Facebook will be number 2, but it will take some time to beat the the “big” Youtube as there is big gap between the views.
Hi,
Nielsen is deadly wrong according to the video of the post below made by Facebook.
http://media-tech.blogspot.com/2009/07/facebook-sert-un-milliard-de-videos-par.html
Around time 02:10 in this video, the Facebook engineer says that they already serve 1 billion video a month…
PS: this video is 4 months old already.
Does anyone know if it’s possible to see how many views a specific video uploaded on Facebook has? (like YouTube number of views)?
Thx.
I crank out a ton of video. Most is posted to 10 services outside of Facebook using TubeMogul, then cross-posted back to Facebook.
@franksinton is on target because Facebook video embeds are huge. They have created a web where no light will escape. Their uniques are 2.5X Hulu’s according to Nielson. YouTube still rocks the super flow, it is the new TV. — TR.
@Frank–Facebook’s video streaming numbers reported in VideoCensus only include streams played through Facebook’s player, not embeds of other players.
How is it that you say Top 20 and I can only see nine properties in the list :-S
@Anand, that was a coding error on my part. It’s been fixed.
@Frank, I’ll check with Nielsen to confirm how they measure.
Pretty amazing, but not surprising.
Is Nielsen counting only Facebook video streams and not embeds of other video services?
If they don’t count embeds, it would be interesting to see what that number becomes if you count embedded plays.