Facebook has finally announced that Facebook Watch, their video platform will be available everywhere from today.
If this platform is new to you, Facebook announced Watch a year ago where they started with a launch in the US first. Facebook Watch allows you to discover videos and interact with friends and creators and it seems like the company’s true competitor to Google’s YouTube.
In the past year, Facebook says they have been able to make Watch’s experience more social so that it is easy to see what videos your friends have liked or shared, watching videos from Pages or creating shows that have an audience participation at the core. Apparently more than 50 million people have watched videos on Watch for at least a minute and the total time taken to watch videos on the platform has increased by 14 times since the start of 2018.
In addition to letting you discover new videos or catch up with creators you love on Watch, you can also view videos you saved to watch later and even watch videos focused on audience participation like trivia games or Premieres.
Watch is a proper YouTube competitor and one of the ways YouTube attracts creators is being able to share revenues with them. Now Facebook says they are expanding their Ad Breaks program so more creators can make money from their videos while giving them tools like insights and best practices in Creator Studio.
To start watching videos on Watch, look for the watch icon on your Android and iOS app and I’ve noticed the presence of that icon for a while now. When you click it, you’ll see a carousel of videos from a number of publishers as well as a top videos for you category for videos Facebook thinks you should watch.
Would Watch be a true YouTube competitor? We will see as they are still finding ways of competing with the behemoth that is YouTube. Facebook also started IGTV recently which targets its now 1 billion user strong ecoystem and now they want to target their over 2 billion user ecosystem with Watch, making it a bigger player than YouTube currently.
