Watch out, YouTube: Facebook wants to eat your lunch — and one of its execs just said that the social network will mostly consist of video posts in the very near future. “A year or two from now, we think Facebook will be mostly video,” said Facebook’s head of ad product Ted Zagat during a panel at Variety’s Entertainment and Technology Summit in Los Angeles Wednesday.
Zagat added virtual reality could be the next big shift after that, with Facebook investing heavily in the space.
Facebook has been making inroads in the video space in recent months. The social network generates around four billion video views every single day, and began to monetize videos from select publishers with in-line autoplay ads.
Facebook’s rise in the video space has not been without controversy. A number of YouTube video creators have been criticizing the company for enabling what’s been known as “freebooting” — the unattributed reposting of their content.
Facebook recently responded to this criticism with the announcement of a new content filtering system that will allow publishers to proactively block content from the platform, much in the same way YouTube is offering this now.
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Facebook hasn’t said yet whether it will add a monetization option to its content recognition technology, but allowing content creators to monetize user-uploaded content would be a logical next step for the company.
