To Boost Video Views, Facebook Tests A New “Watch Later” Button
Video has been one of the fastest-growing content categories on Facebook of late, with 4 billion daily video views on the site as of last quarter. Now, the social network wants to expand that even more.
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook's mid-2015 video push is entering its tooling phase: after reporting 4 billion daily video views last quarter, the network is testing a "Watch Later" button that lets users queue clips they encounter in the feed instead of watching or losing them on the spot. It builds directly on the dedicated video feed, bookmarking, and floating-video experiments Facebook began testing that October — the same feature family aimed at making video a deliberate activity rather than a feed accident.
First-order effects
- Users who scroll past a long video gain a one-tap way to save it for later, converting feed impressions into intended viewings rather than lost ones.
- Publishers posting to Facebook get a second chance at attention from viewers who would otherwise never return to a clip buried hours later in the feed.
Second-order effects
- Deferred viewing shifts watch time toward sessions where users sit down to watch, which is exactly the behavior Facebook's dedicated video feed test was built to capture — and it puts Facebook's save-and-queue experience in closer functional parity with YouTube.
- More completed, intentional views strengthen the case for mid-roll monetization, prefiguring the Ad Breaks rollout that later accompanied Watch's 140M daily users.
Third-order effects
- If saving-to-watch becomes habitual, Facebook completes its evolution from incidental clip host to a scheduled-viewing platform with committed publisher deals — the structure Watch formalized — and video metrics like total daily views give way to session depth as the competitive yardstick.
The trend: Facebook is systematically rebuilding its product around intentional video consumption — saving tools, dedicated feeds, then a standalone Watch destination — turning feed-scrolled clips into appointment viewing.