Yup, you got that right. Facebook doesn’t only reign in the social networking arena, it’s also staking a claim in being among the top video sites in the world.
The result was according to Nielsen’s Video Census released today which looked at the number of video views for the month of October. YouTube topped the chart with 6.6 billion streams and Hulu came in second with 632 million. Facebook came in the 3rd place with 217 million streams, beating out Bing, Yahoo, Fox, ESPN and other sites.
“During the past year, online video viewing has become central to the Web experience,” Jon Gibs, Nielsen’s Vice President of Media Analytics, said in a statement. “In conjunction with this increase, we are seeing remarkable growth in video viewing on social networking sites and it is only natural that these two trends would converge in consumers’ minds, making sites like Facebook and Myspace.com, increasingly important distribution points for both consumer and professionally generated video.”
In September of this year, Facebook only ranked tenth among the most number of video streams.
“Social networking sites are evolving from a venue for catching up with friends to a platform for personal expression, allowing consumers to share their experiences in the full variety of content formats available online,” Gibs said.
