Social network to become the next YouTube as video growth increases

Facebook video is huge and growing steadily, and it just might take on YouTube soon.

Since last year, the video views on the platform have grown by 74 percent globally, and 94 percent in the U.S. That is changing the look of the news feed, with the amount of videos from people and brands in Facebook's timeline increasing by 3.6 times.

Facebook now has over 1 billion video views daily, and 76% of people in the U.S. who use Facebook say they tend to find their videos there.

Facebook hopes that the statistics can help bring new advertisers and others onto the site to share their videos. Announcing the statistics, Facebook offered tips to "content creators" on how they can get their videos noticed on the site.

Since the autoplay feature starts without sound, it is important to make "videos that can catch people's attention even without sound". Also, "shorter, timely video content" tends to do well in the news feed too, Facebook said.

Facebook offers metrics on posted videos to people who run pages, which can show who's watched which videos and for how long.

From the look of things, the site seems poised to take on YouTube, if the growth continues. Some videos have already racked up many more views on Facebook than YouTube — Apple's "The Song" Christmas advert, for instance, has got nearly 21 million views on Facebook and 3.2 million on YouTube.

Twitter is also thought to be launching its own video service to rival the big video sites. That is expected to launch reasonably soon, and will allow people to upload videos straight to Twitter.