Facebook: ‘All video in 5 Years’
June 16, 2016
By Colin Mann
Facebook could be all video and mobile in five years, according to Nicola Mendelsohn, vice president for Facebook in Europe
Asked at Fortune‘s Most Powerful Women International Summit in London to predict where Facebook would be in a half decade in terms of mobile and video, Mendelsohn said the social network would “definitely” be mobile, and would “probably” be “all video”.
“If I was having a bet, it’d be video, video, video.” Who revealed that video content on Facebook was growing even faster than the company anticipated, with its new live video feature becoming “a bigger, faster phenomenon” than it had expected. According to Mendelsohn, live videos receive ten times more comments than pre-recorded videos, meaning that engagement is “much higher”.
Mendelsohn revealed that Facebook users watch an average of 100 million hours of video on mobile every day, with daily views increasing from 1 billion to 8 billion. Meanwhile, text posts are declining year-on-year.
According to Mendelsohn, the shift towards video is valuable in an era of storytelling. “I think it helps us edit. The best way to tell stories in this world, where so much information is coming at us, actually is video. It commands so much information in a much quicker period so actually the trend helps us digest more of the information in a quicker way.”