Video is set to become a bigger part of Facebook – especially for content owners and marketers – as the social network is moving to add play counts to uploaded videos. It says this move came because video views grew 50% between May and June (65% of all access now being mobile). Users can expect more auto-play videos in their feeds as well as new mobile-centric functionality that will push related videos after a user has watched one video – just as YouTube and other video channels already do. Metrics dominate so much of the discussion around music, with everyone from A&Rs to radio programmers are drawing heavily on social numbers in their day-to-day work. YouTube embeds on Facebook count towards cumulative plays but it’s not been straightforward to segment embedded plays by platform and this move by Facebook could be read as Facebook’s desire for creators to upload their videos directly to the site and get play counts there rather than rely on third-party embeds and risk muddying the analytics waters. This move towards greater play transparency (it claims to serve 1bn video views a day) is obviously also related to Facebook’s $400-500m acquisition of video ad tech company LiveRail in July so that it can further court the advertising industry to allocate more of its spend on its platform.
Tools: platforms to help you reach new audiences
Tools: Kaiber
In the year or so since its launch, AI startup Kaiber has been making waves,…