With all the talk about Facebook traffic troubles for publishers, we wanted to investigate a little further. Insights from social video analytics company Tubular Labs reveal that while there have indeed been some fluctuations when it comes to video on Facebook, for the most part views and engagements have been steady over the last few months.
We looked at views, engagements and uploads from March through May this year for U.S. publishers in the media & entertainment sphere with 500K+ followers and at least 10K+ views per video. Specifically, we found:
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- Views from March to April grew about 1.4%, but dropped slightly in May with the total percent change from March to May hovering around a 1% increase. Put simply, publishers are still reaching their audiences.
- Engagements went up about 3% from March to April, but dropped again in May with the total percent change from March to May at about -0.7%.
- Uploads slowed throughout the period measured, with about a -3.5% drop from March to May.
We also looked at some of the publishers and videos that had the most traction over March and April (note: Tubular releases their May leaderboards mid-month; monthly numbers for May 2018 are not yet publicly available).
In March, Buzzfeed’s Tasty topped the list of popular U.S. publishers with nearly 1.4 billion Facebook views. Its “Banana Bread on a Stick” video was the most-viewed with 52.4 million views, 27 million of which occured in just the first three days according to Tubular’s V3 rating.
In April, NTD Funniest lead the way with over 1.9 billion Facebook video views. A three-minute clip complication of super cute babies garnered the most total views (154 million), with 12.6 million occurring in the first three days according to Tubular’s V3 rating.
