Image by Dimitris Kalogeropoylos

From John Herrman yesterday:

“What the shift to Facebook video means is that Facebook is more interested in hosting the things media companies make than just spreading them, that it views links to outside pages as a problem to be solved, and that it sees Facebook-hosted video as an example of the solution. A company that uploads its videos to Facebook is not the publisher of those videos. At best, it produced them.

““What the Shift to Video Means,” additionally, is that Facebook has been successful in its first major attempt to requisition the media that it has up until this point partnered with … much of the benefit publishers have derived from Facebook over the last three years, which required only occasional and modest adherence to Facebook’s explicit and implicit guidance, will disappear for organizations that are not interested in ceasing to be publishers to become “creators,””

And from Thomas Baekdal last week:

“[Facebook’s claim of a] 50% increase in [Facebook video] traffic wasn’t really because people were watching more video. Most of it came from how Facebook is measuring it. On YouTube, a video view is measured as a real view. As in a single person choosing to watch the video. It’s a deliberate and validated action.

“On Facebook, a video view is counted if a video is in view for an auto-playing 3 seconds or longer. You don’t have to be much of an analyst to realize that those two are not even remotely comparable. YouTube is measuring real people choosing to do real things, while Facebook’s video measurements are as a bad as with banner ads.”