When we think of online video, we think of YouTube. Or we often consider the user-generated videos of Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram. One platform -that isn’t known for its video- surpassed the one billion monthly video mark, just one year after they launched native video. Any guesses as to which one?
The first billion is the hardest. A year after introducing a native video player and giving its users the ability to record and post their own videos to the platform, Reddit says it’s now averaging one billion “native” video views per month.
Video is becoming a growing medium for how Reddit users interact with each other, the company said. In August, Reddit users posted or uploaded a total of 996,000 videos on the site, which is up 31 percent year over year. Reddit is now serving more than 400,000 hours of hosted videos per day and 13 million hours per month, up 38 percent since the beginning of 2018.
Unlike most publishers, Reddit is its own platform and does not rely on platforms like YouTube and Facebook to rack up video views (though users can still embed other video players on the platform). One thing in Reddit’s favor: the company said it has 330 million monthly active users, which means it has plenty of users who can learn to adopt video as part of their Reddit experience. (According to comScore, Reddit reached 73 million unique visitors in the U.S. across platforms in August.)
What does this mean for marketers and advertisers? Digiday continues:
Reddit is not running in-stream ads against its videos but instead places ads within its various feeds and subreddits. The company said its ad revenue has more than tripled over the last three years, but declined to share a specific revenue figure as well as how much video is contributing to the overall ad business.
Should competitors feel threatened? Short answer: not yet.
While a billion monthly video views and growing adoption among users is a promising start, Reddit still has a long way to go to catch other platforms, which capture billions of video views per day, said Paul Verna, principal analyst at eMarketer. And for most of Reddit’s history, video has not been an integral part of the largely text-heavy platform.
“There is a mental leap that users have to make,” said Verna. “It’s a start, but if they’re going to compete with other platforms, they’re going to have to keep doing it better and more.”