Facebook gains on YouTube in music-video posts, viewers

Beyoncé recently posted a video on Facebook and YouTube that took her fans behind the scenes to see the preparations for her live performance last month at the MTV Video Music Awards.

YouTube still hugeYouTube is still the big gorilla of online video, especially as an archive for work with lasting appeal and as a place where creators can make money from ads sold around their material.

[...] Facebook's ability to use social connections to make content popular quickly, along with changes the social network has made to its news feed to showcase video better, have helped fuel rapid growth in the amount of video viewed on the service over the last year.

Since June, Facebook, which has about 1.3 billion monthly users worldwide, has served up an average of a billion video views a day, two-thirds of them on mobile devices.

Ordinary users are just starting to learn how to shoot great video on their smartphones, and most professional video creators do not know how to use the social network to amplify their audiences.

Ze Frank, president of BuzzFeed Motion Pictures, said Facebook is especially useful for spreading videos that strike a chord with particular groups, such as women, Latinos or Southern Californians, since they tend to share the videos with like-minded friends.

Perhaps nothing demonstrates Facebook's strengths in video more than the "Ice Bucket Challenge," this summer's social media phenomenon in which millions of people, from celebrities to unknowns, poured buckets of ice water over their heads and challenged others to do the same to raise money for research into amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and other charitable endeavors.

No direct revenueUnlike YouTube, which places ads before and around many of the videos on its site, Facebook does not get any direct revenue from video traffic other than from a few videos similar to television commercials that are bought specifically as ads.