14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook's bet on live streaming is paying off, it seems, as one in five videos shared on the social network nowadays is, or was, at one point, a live transmission.
That's a huge number given how much video content goes through Facebook nowadays, and it's only going to grow now that the social network has opened live streaming to desktop users as well.
The stats regarding the popularity of the live videos was shared by Fidji Simo, Facebook's chief of video, on her personal page. She also added that daily watch time for Facebook live broadcasts has grown by more than four times.
"Since then [at Facebook's 2016 LA event], we've focused on making the Facebook Live experience more engaging, more fun, and more social. We've added live masks and new creative effects, built features that give publishers more control and flexibility over their broadcasts and rolled out exciting new formats like Live 360 and Live Audio," Simo notes.
Long-term investment
The company has put a lot of money and thought into pushing this feature, including by paying media companies, athletes, and celebrities tens of millions of dollars to produce high-quality live videos that people would want to watch. That content was also an opportunity for Facebook to also test what worked and what didn't in order to fine-tune its systems.
The end goal, however, is not to pay brands to put their content on Facebook, because they'll do that anyway. The idea is to get people to start using the feature, to go "live" and to tell those online what's happening around them, whether it's something silly they just thought of, or an event they're attending, or even a protest somewhere in the world. It's certainly a surefire way to draw attention to such a situation and many have taken advantage of Facebook's feature thus far.