Facebook Looking to Battle YouTube in the Social Video Space‏

Facebook placed a big bet on video and mobile revenue in 2013, looking to change the way users on the social network interact and upload. The new auto-play silent videos have been a big hit and viral content has started spawning on Facebook, instead of YouTube or Vine.

This change in where viral content is posted might be just a fad, but it is more likely Facebook has caught onto something hot, even if users claimed it was the death of the social network, when they first announced auto-play videos.

For videos like Lets Plays, YouTube is still the king-pin, locking down the video game and other markets like short sketches, machinima and makeup tutorials. This is due to shared revenue schemes YouTube has in place, which Facebook currently does not offer.

This might be a change Facebook is looking to make, as more pages switch to viral video content, Facebook could offer users a shared revenue scheme, allowing them to make videos as part of a job, similar to YouTube.

Blogs and viral content might not be the only things to spring up from this change, if users were capable of making revenue on Facebook, the audience is bigger than YouTube and might lead to huge amounts of revenue for the content owner.

Facebook would still need to look into flagging systems, to allow content owners more rights and might have to change how pages work, to make them more function for the owner. Comments might need improved, although YouTube comments aren’t any good either.

Having Facebook as the new place to watch videos from your favorite channels seems a bit weird now, but it could turn into a massive market for Facebook, since video ads tend to make a lot more money than traditional text ads.