14 DAY TRIAL // It seems that Facebook is taking on YouTube when it comes to videos. If last year Facebook decided to introduce auto playing video ads just like YouTube did some time before, during yesterday’s F8 conference, Mark Zuckerberg announced another feature that will be available for the videos that pop up in the news feed.
Apparently, we will now be able to embed videos from Facebook onto other websites of our choice, such as personal blogs.
Users had been waiting for this feature for quite some time, so it was good news for everyone. Every video should now have the embed option that you have to click on in order to obtain the URL, which can then be pasted onto a specific site.
YouTube is losing ground to Facebook
The addition of this feature proves that Facebook is actually taking its competition with YouTube quite seriously, the latter having made this option available for its users a while back. It was about time Facebook adopted it as well, as it was impossible to share Facebook video otherwise.
Facebook is expected to use the video embedding option to boost its revenues coming from the auto playing ads. It is known that YouTube also uses ads with its videos, but the money received from the advertisement companies is split between YouTube and the person who has created the video.
Facebook, however, has made no mention on this issue, although it is very unlikely that they would agree to share the profits resulted from the ads with the users.
What’s more, after YouTube announced earlier this month that they would be supporting 360-degree videos on the platform, Facebook has also just released the information that this option would also be available in the News Feed.
It is yet unclear if the ability to move your Android around and experience the 360-degree video experience will also be available for Facebook videos as it currently is for YouTube.
Following these announcements, it would seem that Facebook is trying hard to improve the quality of videos from their platform, but also to dethrone the video-sharing website.
It remains to be seen if people will prefer Facebook over YouTube, considering that it might offer similar services.