Behind Facebook Live, in conversation with Mark Zuckerberg and chief product officer Chris Cox
Why Facebook And Mark Zuckerberg Went All In On Live Video — It was February, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was just back from paternity leave, sitting in on his first M team meeting since returning. Tweets: @om , @joshelman , @stevekovach , @lheron and @mat Tweets: Om Malik / @om : Facebook Live grows up. It had to. Because the battle of attention really is with Snapchat, which is now winning. http://www.buzzfeed.com/... Josh Elman / @joshelman : Facebook in social is as dominant now as Microsoft was in mid-late 90s. And as good of a second mover. http://www.buzzfeed.com/... Steve Kovach / @stevekovach : Makes sense. Tech Insider's live FB videos rack up tens of thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of views in just a few mins. Viewers <3 it. Liz Heron / @lheron : Facebook marshalling entire company around 1 product, like FB Live, is unusual enough that it didn't happen the whole time I was there. Mat Honan / @mat : I talked to Mark Zuckerberg and Chris Cox about why Facebook went all in on Live video. Here's what they had to say http://www.buzzfeed.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This interview lands a month after Re/code reported that Mark Zuckerberg was 'obsessed' with livestreaming and had made Live a top priority at Facebook — here he and chief product officer Chris Cox explain the reasoning behind that push. The framing in the surrounding commentary is blunt: Om Malik argues the battle for attention is with Snapchat, which he says is currently winning.
Josh Elman supplies the strategic lens — Facebook's dominance in social now resembles Microsoft's in the mid-to-late 1990s, and its strength is as a fast second mover. That makes the Live push less a new bet than a familiar playbook: absorb a rival's format and out-distribute it.
First-order effects
- Facebook shifts engineering and product resources behind Live under direct CEO sponsorship, with Zuckerberg personally sitting in on product meetings after returning from paternity leave.
- Snapchat's grip on younger users' attention becomes the explicit internal benchmark — Live's success is measured against a rival's format, not against Facebook's own News Feed baseline.
Second-order effects
- Facebook follows through with paid promotion: by October it runs a major ad campaign built around user Live videos, spending marketing dollars to seed the format it copied rather than relying on organic adoption alone.
- Live gets extended beyond solo broadcasting — side-by-side streaming and private chatrooms arrive in 2017, and audio-only rooms follow in 2021 — turning one copied format into a family of features that keeps users inside Facebook instead of drifting to Snapchat.
Third-order effects
- If the second-mover pattern holds, format originators like Snapchat face a structural problem: any feature that works gets replicated by a platform with roughly two billion monthly users, so innovation advantage migrates from inventing formats to owning distribution.
- The commercial payoff shows up in the numbers — by Q1 2018 Facebook posts $11.97B in revenue, up 49% year over year — suggesting engagement plays like Live feed directly into the ad machine that funds the next round of feature absorption.
The trend: Social platforms are converging on a copy-and-outscale model where the winner of each format war is decided by distribution scale rather than who shipped first.