Facebook says video posts per person have increased 75% globally, 94% in US since last year
What the Shift to Video Means for Creators — We're increasingly seeing a shift towards visual content on Facebook, especially with video. In just one year, the number of video posts per person …
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook opened 2015 by quantifying a pivot it had been telegraphing all year: video posts per person up 75% globally and 94% in the US, framed explicitly as guidance for creators. That framing sat against a competitive backdrop already taking shape — a mid-2015 study projected Facebook delivering two-thirds as many video views as YouTube that year, even while YouTube kept posting 50% annual view growth across three straight years.
First-order effects
- Creators and publishers get their clearest signal yet to produce natively for Facebook rather than cross-posting, since per-person posting volume is the input that later compounds into the 8 billion daily video views Facebook reported by November, double its April figure.
- YouTube's growth story is now contested at the top: Facebook's 75% global posting growth puts a direct challenger behind YouTube's 50% annual view gains.
Second-order effects
- Facebook deepens video beyond passive viewing — letting users comment with a video — which converts video from a content format into a participation format and gives creators new surface area for audience interaction.
- As view volume scales, advertising budgets concentrate around whichever platform owns video distribution; the eventual endpoint visible in later market data is four platforms — Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok — capturing over 90% of social media ad revenue.
Third-order effects
- The trajectory runs from feed-embedded clips to video as the interface itself: by 2017 one in five shared videos was Live with daily watch time up 4x, and Facebook went on to plan tests of a full-screen immersive player replacing the News Feed in select markets — the feed becoming a video product.
- If posting growth, view growth, and interactive formats keep compounding, social media structurally consolidates around a handful of video-first platforms, squeezing text-centric networks and making video infrastructure a prerequisite for relevance.
The trend: Social networking is reorganizing itself around native video, with Facebook's posting and viewing growth turning video from a format into the primary distribution layer.