FB V GOOG: WHO’S REALLY WINNING IN DIGITAL VIDEO?

WWW.INSIGHT.VENTUREBEAT.COM
FB V GOOG: WHO’S
REALLY WINNING
IN DIGITAL VIDEO?
SPRING 2015
Updated October 2, 2015 • John Koetsier
FB v GOOG.pdf for Filipp Paster (ph.paster@gmail.com). Not for public or external distribution.

05
Contents
07
12
14
21
Executive summary
Introduction: Winning is not optional
$600 billion table stakes
»» TV ad $$$ go digital
The hype
The battle
»» Theft, lies, and
Facebook video
»» The blue response
The reality: Google is still Godzilla
»» YouTube video: app + web
»» Facebook video
»» Global numbers
Diving deeper
»» The desert island:
YouTube vs Facebook
»» Youth and YouTube
»» Mobile: Facebook’s
territory?
»» Longform videos: YouTube,
YouTube, YouTube
Digital video: looking to the future
»» Facebook: momentum
»» Google: the challenge
»» VR and Oculus Rift: a
game-changer?
»» A note on monetization
»» Marketers & publishers:
what does this mean?
Appendix
»» Survey population details
»» Data partners
11
25
03
31

FB V GOOG: WHO’S REALLY WINNING IN DIGITAL VIDEO? 3
Executive summary
Every single day, the world's internet users spend well over 150,000 aggregated years
reading, watching, clicking, liking, and commenting on digital content on the two global
superpowers of digital content's sites: Facebook, and Google's YouTube. And every single
day, more and more of the world's $600 billion advertising spend moves from TV and
other legacy media to digital.
Cue WWIII.
One of the hottest battlegrounds is digital video. Mobile video advertising has jumped 5X
in past months, and video offers the clearest path for TV's $172.5 billion in ad spend to go
digital. Facebook's been staking a claim here, and media outlets have been proclaiming
Google's demise.

But what does the data say?
In this report, you'll find:
• how big Facebook video actually is
• how much bigger YouTube is
• how much video content YouTube
and Facebook deliver every single
day, globally and in the U.S.
• why this battle matters
• how mobile-centric YouTube
is today
• which Americans choose as their
primary video platform: YouTube
or Facebook
• where millenials and youth
are trending
• the future of digital video
• what content providers and
marketers should do
All together, the insights will help inform marketers and content providers making their
next steps in digital video.

Introduction: Winning is not optional
There’s been a lot of talk about Facebook and digital video. And, by announcing a
staggering 4 billion daily video views in June of this year, Facebook essentially laid claim to
the title of the next big video platform.
But we’ve discovered that Google’s YouTube is actually still 11X bigger than Facebook in
terms of video viewing:
We’ve also seen that globally, YouTube delivers 46,000 years of video viewing every single
day across its massive audience of 300 million regular mobile users and 500 million daily
web visits. While Facebook provides over well over 100,000 years of content consumption
globally every single day, only 5,625 years of that is video consumption.

Even so, that’s impressive, and growing … but it’s not near where YouTube is, yet.
The stakes are high here: the $600 billion global advertising spend, which is increasingly
going digital, and increasingly moving from TV to digital video both online and mobile.
Winning the lion’s share of this market will determine the status of the superpower digital
companies for years to come.
We also break down the YouTube and Facebook audiences by age and mobile-versus-PC,
and find that the younger you are, the more likely you are to pick YouTube over Facebook
… all of which means that YouTube — and Google — are far from being counted out in
this critical race.

$600 billion table stakes
We are going digital. As we go digital, TV is going digital.
Some of it is cord-cutting, some of it is additive, and some of it is second-screen, but the
reality is that 92% of millennials are watching video online and that is increasingly where
young people turn when they want to, as Steve Jobs put it, “turn their brains off.”

So last year, for the first time, time spent on mobile outpaced time spent watching TV.
As mobile devices proliferate and time spent on devices starts to outweigh time spent
with traditional entertainment, it’s no surprise that advertising is going digital too.

TV AD $$$ GO DIGITAL
TV advertising will hit $71 billion this year in the U.S. alone, and globally, the number is a
staggering $172.5 billion. In contrast, digital (web and mobile) advertising in the U.S. was
$49.5 billion last year, and will be $60 billion in 2015.
So TV is still bigger.
Put it all together, and global advertising is a $600 billion market that is going digital
fast. Currently, global digital ad spend is around $150 billion — not quite a third — while
markets like the U.S. are about a third digital.
That $600 billion is going digital fast. It’s going mobile fast. And it’s going video fast.
The question is: who will benefit most ... which company will take the largest slice
of that market?

Google’s $66 billion revenue in 2014 — almost all from digital advertising — says it’s got a
great shot. Facebook might be less than 20% of Google’s size: its 2014 revenue of $12.47
billion is small in comparison. But Facebook’s big bet on mobile and its fast growth — 42%
in Q1 2015, 38% in Q2 2015 — make it a strong contender too.

The hype
Who’s going to dominate this $600 billion market? The headlines are blaring: Facebook is
winning, Google is losing.
• “It's official: Google blew it with YouTube, and Facebook has caught up.”
• “How Facebook's video-traffic explosion is shaking up the advertising world”
• “Facebook ready to challenge Google’s video portal”
And the truth is that the company has a great shot at it.
Facebook now connects 1.5 billion people, a massive and significant fraction of our global
population. On Monday, August 24, 2015, for the very first time, over one billion people
connected to Facebook in a single day. In June, the company announced that it was
delivering 4 billion video views daily.
That’s shockingly fast growth. And it means that Facebook has a massive shot at being
the company that will connect us all … and benefit financially from being able to package
global-sized chunks of consumers for advertisers.
But Google is no slouch either.
Its home page gets almost 16.5 billion visits every month, SimilarWeb says. Its video
site, YouTube, gets over 15 billion monthly visits, with average duration of a massive 20
minutes. The YouTube apps have billions of installs — very few apps can say this — and
the average users spend almost 45 minutes per day in the app, watching videos.
So we wanted to see what the data — not just the hype — says.

The battle
Not shockingly, this is a very serious battle for the control of digital advertising. Unusually,
the players have gotten a little bit public and traded deniable potshots at arms length like,
sort of like superpowers fighting proxy wars in Asia.
THEFT, LIES, AND FACEBOOK VIDEO
The first salvo was fired by Hank Green, an “Internetainerpreneur” who first published
on Medium in late July, asking the question of whether Facebook was lying about video
views. Green noted that he has about 70% viewer retention through his complete 3-4
minute videos on YouTube, but only 21% retention through 30 seconds of the same
videos on Facebook.
“I’m willing to bet that 80% of viewership is simply the effect of Facebook’s auto-playing of
my video as people scroll through their feeds,” he said, provocatively
YouTube counts a view at around 30 seconds; Facebook at just 3 seconds.
Green also complained about Facebook pushing
native video — video uploaded straight to
Facebook — much harder than embedded video
from YouTube, saying it seemed like “an abuse
of power.”
But his major argument was that most of the
video content on Facebook is “stolen” … that
according to an Ogilvy report, 725 of the most
popular 1,000 videos on Facebook were re-
uploads, published by someone other than the
original creator.
Almost 75%
of the videos
on Facebook
were re-uploads.

And that Facebook is doing little if anything to protect copyright holders — as opposed to
YouTube, which has a Content ID that auto-checks every video against a big database of
copyrighted content.
That’s critical, because if you’re a major YouTube star with hundreds of millions or
billions of view — and millions of dollars in annual earnings — you want to protect that
status and revenue.
THE BLUE RESPONSE
In response, Facebook product manager Matt Pakes argued, also on Medium, that
Facebook does care about content creators and is working on solutions for protecting
their property.
More to the view counting point, Pakes argued that counting videos is going to be
different for 10-minute episodes versus 6-second Vines. Since there is no broad industry
standard, 3 seconds is one common choice, and “gives us a consistent metric for all video
on Facebook.” 3 seconds, he says, demonstrates intent to watch.
The benefit of the 3 second count, of course, is that Facebook can count massive numbers
of views.
Whether you believe Facebook’s explanation or not is up to you. One good thing: it
implicitly recognizes that video on Facebook is much more likely to be a quick, almost
ephemeral thing, than video elsewhere.
(Which you will most certainly see in this research.)

The reality: Google is still Godzilla
It’s true that Facebook has seen some incredible growth in digital video consumption. But
the hard truth for Menlo Park is that Google is much bigger than Facebook in digital video.
How much bigger?
Try 11X bigger.
Every single day, Americans spend an aggregate of 8,061 years watching video on
YouTube. In the same time period, they spend an aggregate of 713 years watching video
on Facebook. These conclusions are based on SimilarWeb data, which is generated from a
panel of over 100 million monitored devices.
That’s a significant difference.
And, it’s under-reporting Google by not counting off-YouTube web views (which are
significant) or in-app but not in the YouTube app views. (Sports apps, for instance,
routinely embed snippets of YouTube video in update reports.) In addition, it almost
certainly over-reports Facebook video hours by assuming that each video is completely
watched … which we know is not the case.

YOUTUBE VIDEO: APP + WEB
To calculate how much time Americans spent watching videos on YouTube, we used
SimilarWeb data to determine that while almost 99% of Android users have the Youtube
app installed on their phones — not shocking; it comes pre-installed — just under 30%
of Android users are daily users, opening the app almost 5 times daily for just over 9
minutes, totalling almost 43 minutes daily.
Based on 98 million U.S. Android users, we get this:
We don’t have as clean data on the iOS app, but know that while install percentage will be
way down — Youtube is not pre-installed as it once was — usage is still strong. Months
after Apple booted it from the default set of apps, it remained the most-downloaded app
on iOS. It’s still the top-downloaded video app, and it has varied from the third to sixth-
most downloaded app over the last few months.

For example, using data from MobileAction, we see that YouTube has almost 23 million
downloads on iOS so far in 2015, about 2/3 of Facebook’s downloads:
So our informed guesstimate is that on iOS YouTube has similar DAU and engagement
numbers as on Android.
In fact, that’s probably under-reporting iOS users’ video time, for two important reasons.
One, iOS users in the U.S. tend to skew younger than Android users ... and we know from
our survey — see below — that the younger you are, the more you tend to watch YouTube
videos. And two, iOS users tend to use their devices more heavily — up to 40% more!
(Also see this post, and more recent data on mobile browser share with 160 million user
sample size.)
YOUTUBE VS FACEBOOK , UNITED STATES (IOS ONLY)
MONTH YOUTUBE FACEBOOK
Jan 2,508,862.23 3,500,787.42
Feb 2,515,570.06 4,065,105.12
Mar 3,027,806.31 4,478,681.68
Apr 2,585,996.69 4,258,200.91
May 3,249,351.41 4,666,804.76
Jun 3,208,485.30 4,153,953.47
Jul 2,760,495.29 3,532,996.50
Aug 2,447,460.16 3,507,364.49
Sep 607,359.76 708,189.71
TOTAL 22,911,387.21 32,872,084.06

Even this likely under-reporting results in over 2,000 more years per day across 84 million
U.S. iPhone users.
Meanwhile, on the good old-fashion web, 102.5 million Americans visit YouTube.com
every day, according to SimilarWeb data, spending an average of almost 19 minutes on-
site, watching close to 32 million hours of video.
Add it all up, and you’ve got over 8,000 years of video watching every single day. And
most of that estimate is based on objective, third-party usage data. The only speculative
component is iOS usage, which, as we’ve demonstrated above, is likely under-reported.
FACEBOOK VIDEO
Facebook is massive too — of course.
The company has a 70% install ratio on U.S. smartphones, and 46.44% of all smartphone
users launch it at least once a day, with the average user opening the app almost 16 times
daily for about 3.5 minutes each time, totalling 51 daily minutes of use.
On the web, 154 million Americans access the site daily, according to SimilarWeb,
spending an average of almost 16 minutes daily on Facebook.com. Again, add it all up,
and you’ve got 22,254 years of aggregate time Americans spend each day on Facebook.
Globally, that tops out at well over 101,529 years of consumption, every single day.
That’s simply massive, and unparalleled. But it’s not all watching video, of course.
Now we have to figure out how many Facebook users are watching videos, and how long
they’re spending. Here, Facebook has provided the best data, announcing in June that it
was delivering over 4 billion videos daily.

That’s global, though, and the company has not released a lot of data specifically about
the U.S.
But Facebook did say in January of 2015 that at least 50% of American users were
watching an average of 1 video/day on the social network. And if in June Facebook said
it was delivering 4 billion videos daily across its 1.5 billion global users, each user was
watching 2.7 videos daily, on average, at that point. Using that number — and the average
length of a Facebook video, which Socialbakers says is 44 seconds long — and we come
up with about 2 minutes of video watching per day.
That’s still significant, and adds up to over 5,600 years of video watching every single day,
in aggregate, by Facebook’s global monthly active users. Shrink that down to just the U.S.,
and we can see that Facebook is delivering about 713 years of video every single day to
Americans, which means that Google’s YouTube is about 11X the size of Facebook video.
A few notes:
It’s true that Facebook video is growing fast, since the company went from 1 video/day for half
of its American users to almost 3 for all of its users in just 5 months. Also, Americans are likely
to watch more video than users in countries with less content and weaker connectivity. So you
could conceivably double that number.
However, the flip side of this coin is that the YouTube data we have is solid third-party
measured-and-extrapolated data. The Facebook data is mainly from Facebook itself, and
doesn’t take into account a known fact: few Facebook videos are watched to the end, and the
social network counts 3 seconds of a video playing as a “view.”
So, on reflection, we left the numbers where they are. We will adjust them when Facebook
releases fresh data.

GLOBAL NUMBERS
As we said, globally Facebook delivers 5,652 years of video viewing every single day:
YouTube, on the other hand, almost certainly delivers almost 46,000 years of video
viewing every single day across the entire globe, with apps edging out web:
And here are the details ...
App
Most developed nations have between a 20 to 30 percent daily average user rate of
YouTube users — except for China, where YouTube is banned by government edict.
Since according to Ericsson’s latest Mobility Report there are now 2.6 billion smartphone
subscribers and we know that a little over 80% of them are Android users, after
subtracting China’s Android users we come up with just over 1.4B Android users.

Almost 300 million of them are YouTube users, and they watch over 23,000 years of
YouTube content daily. Then we add 10% for iOS users, who have similar YouTube usage
and viewing habits.
Web
On the web, YouTube.com gets over 500 million visits each day, each lasting over 20
minutes. That adds up to almost 20,000 years of viewing time.

Diving deeper
THE DESERT ISLAND: YOUTUBE VS FACEBOOK
When we asked 586 Americans where they watch video, YouTube is the clear leader, with
Facebook at about 45% of Google’s video site.
But if we forced them to choose only one platform, Americans pick YouTube by more
than a 5:1 ratio:

YOUTH AND YOUTUBE
The younger you are, the more likely you are to watch video on YouTube, and the more
likely you are to watch for long periods of time.
Millennials and Facebook has been an issue for years now, with some evidence that teens
are abandoning Facebook for platforms like Snapchat. Facebook, of course, has addressed
that with WhatsApp, Instagram, and to some extent, potentially, other initiatives in AR/VR.
Interestingly, YouTube and Facebook have an inverse relationship with youth: the
younger you are, the more you tend to spend time watching videos on YouTube, while
the older you are, the more you tend to spend time on Facebook.
MOBILE: FACEBOOK’S TERRITORY?
Facebook has gotten a lot of props in the last few years for its mobile expertise, with good
reason. Over three quarters of the social network’s revenue now comes from mobile.

But while Google might be a bit later to the party, it’s no slouch either, with 56% of its
traffic coming from mobile:
In addition, when we asked Americans where they preferred to watch video, and then
correlated the results with how they like to watch video — on their computers or on their
phones — YouTube won at every combination from 100% computer to 100% phone.

LONGFORM VIDEOS: YOUTUBE, YOUTUBE, YOUTUBE
YouTube users watch much longer videos — and watch for much longer — than
Facebook users.
Almost all Facebook video that our survey respondents watch are between 1 and 5
minutes. YouTube users are 4X as likely to watch for over an hour, 5X as likely to watch for
about an hour, and more than 2X as likely to watch for at least 20 minutes.

Digital video: looking to the future
Clearly, YouTube/Google is a force to be reckoned with in digital video. Clearly, it still has
the leadership position. And clearly, Google is a company that knows how to monetize
digital content.
But both Google and Facebook have work to do to continue or assume leadership in
digital video.
FACEBOOK: MOMENTUM
There’s no denying that Facebook has significant positive momentum.
There’s also no denying that the social network has
figured out, perhaps better than any other company,
how to monetize mobile. In addition, the company
has the largest resource of personal data on the
largest segment of humanity of any company in
existence, which should help it target and deliver
content and experiences — including in digital video
— in monetizable ways.
YouTube, on the other hand, has long struggled to be
a significant revenue source for Google.
However, in recent years there are signs that this is
changing, and very recently, in July of 2015, Google
announced that YouTube was seeing significant
momentum of its own, with watch time for YouTube
jumping a massive 60% in the second quarter of
the year.

But if Facebook maintains its current rate of growth — from almost nothing a couple of
years ago to 4 billion daily views in mid 2015 — there’s no doubt that it will challenge
Google and YouTube for leadership in digital video in just a few years.
Facebook will want to not just continue pushing video in every other post on users’
streams, but find ways to encourage viewing beyond a few seconds or minutes, and
discovery after the first video. One of those ways, as you can see in this image to the
right, is by showcasing and highlighting more video content after a user has finished
watching a video.
It remains to be seen, however, if Facebook’s users will start to associate the social
network with longer-form video viewing.
GOOGLE: THE CHALLENGE
The question is what Google — or Alphabet — will do in the future to replace the
Google+ vision.
In other words, what it will do to:
1. stimulate video discovery, as Facebook does so well
2. develop a deep understanding of what people like and care about, as Facebook does
3. and, get better at showing its users the right videos at the right time
Today, however, YouTube is where you go to watch video, and watch it for long periods
of time. Facebook is the place you go to connect and consume, and increasingly that
consumption includes video content.

The challenge is on Google to monetize its massive video consumption lead.
One massive advantage: it has a revenue-sharing
plan already, which encourages content producers
to post, and it has an open sharing and embedding
model for the wider web which Facebook — with its
more closed-garden approach — will have a hard
time emulating.
That revenue-sharing plan has made hundreds of
YouTube stars who earn their livings on the video
platform, including perhaps 15 with earnings over
$1 million/year.
Given what the company has done throughout its
history, it’s probably not a good idea to bet against
Google’s ability to improve its own monetization and
capture a significant chunk of TV’s current advertising
revenue. But the company has had some mis-steps
in social with Google+, and it’s search-based cash
cow utilizes the goal-focused intent graph that likely
doesn’t work nearly as well for entertainment-focused
video consumption.
So it’s not a slam dunk.
And it is a good test of Alphabet’s ability to reinvent itself for new market realities.

VR AND OCULUS RIFT: A GAME-CHANGER?
Facebook, in fact, has a potentially unique opportunity to seize the digital video
leadership, through its $2B purchase of Oculus Rift in 2014.
Just last month it became clear that the company
intends for this VR headset to become a mainstream
mass market gadget, as it partnered with Samsung to
announce a $99 Gear VR product that will be launched
next year. That’s a game-changer, and you can imagine
Facebook — the company that also offers Instagram
and WhatsApp, and split off Messenger from its core
app last year — releasing a separate app just for video,
and maybe just for Occulus video.
All of a sudden, the landscape would change. And it’s
not clear what response Google and YouTube would
have ready, although the company has been working on
VR technology of its own.
This is where Google is most vulnerable, since a Gear VR for Rift video content via a
Facebook video app would almost certainly — if enough content exists — be something
that millenials and others would spend long periods of time immersed in.
A NOTE ON MONETIZATION
Currently, content owners can monetize better on YouTube than Facebook.
Facebook will need to find better ways to ensure that content rightsholders get credit for
their content — and can get paid for it, as per YouTube. There are currently no Facebook
video stars earning a living from ad revenue on videos shown on Facebook ... while you
have dozens of YouTube stars who earn a living on the platform showcasing their gaming,
their purchases, their lifestyle, and more.
Facebook
has a unique
opportunity
to seize the
digital video
leadership.

This may change, and Facebook is experimenting with ad revenue sharing similar to
what YouTube already does. To really kickstart it, however, Facebook needs to provide a
video discovery and consumption experience that goes beyond encountering videos in
your stream.
That’s something that could come via Oculus, as we’ve already discussed.
MARKETERS & PUBLISHERS: WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?
With two major platforms, marketers can’t afford to ignore either one. You need to play in
both spaces.
You have to upload your content to YouTube, and you have to upload — not embed —
your content natively in Facebook too, to guarantee maximum exposure. However, you
can tailor your approach to each platform intelligently.
Facebook
• Go shorter
• Go emotive
• Use for fan/customer/prospect acquisition
Facebook video works better for short content that is socially volatile and inspires
emotion: something that’s exciting, horrible, wonderful, awe-inspiring, or funny. Facebook
can help you reach new fans, users, or customers.
But watch for VR content and Facebook’s app and platform moves around the Gear VR
launch. This could be a game-changer for more long-form video.

YouTube
• Vary length, but do some long pieces
• Go deep
• Use for fan/customer/prospect engagement
YouTube video works well for longer content that users can embed themselves in for 5,
10, 20, 30, or even 60 minutes. Here, you can provide deep content to satisfy and engage
existing customers, fans, or users ... and, perhaps, move them down whatever funnel you
have for actions that lead to monetization.
Summing up
Clearly, for social impact and multiplication, you can’t ignore Facebook. And for bulk
attention — andspreading around the web via embeds — you can’t ignore YouTube.
Use both, and be thankful that increasing competition for your content is likely going to
mean good things for your ability to grow audience and revenue.
Look for more
VB will be publishing more on video content marketing and video content engagement in
the future.
Brands: if you’re looking for data on video advertising on mobile, check our Brands and
Mobile Advertising report.

Appendix
SURVEY POPULATION DETAILS
Total population that answered every question in the survey was 500; some questions had
up to 568 repondents. Data was gathered online and via mobile.
The male-female split:
Age of respondents:

DATA PARTNERS
We are indebted to the following companies for their assistance in providing raw data:
• Survata
• SimilarWeb
• MobileAction

Research at VB is future-focused and predictive. It’s
actionable. It’s something that you can rely on when
making business decisions. That’s no simple matter.
It requires more than pontification, more than a few
desultory vendor interviews, and more than a few
phone calls. It requires rigor, deep analysis, patient data-
collection, and tested insights.
That’s how we do research at VB, and that’s our
commitment to you!
WWW.INSIGHT.VENTUREBEAT.COM
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FB V GOOG: WHO’S REALLY WINNING IN DIGITAL VIDEO?

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