More than 80 news outlets tapped Facebook to broadcast Trump Tower climber
Facebook is continuing its grand quest to become the new television. The social networking giant released new statistics Thursday that tout its ability to be the go-to platform for news outlets to broadcast and for people to consume live video of breaking news situations.
Today’s case study -- the climber scaling the side of Trump Tower in New York City.
Two weeks ago, more than 80 news organizations broadcasted the climb on Facebook Live. More than 14 million people worldwide watched the footage, Facebook revealed in a blog post on its media blog.
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A reminder that Facebook considers a unique view to be three seconds, which is the standard in digital industry but not apples-to-apples comparable to television ratings. Facebook users could have been passively scrolling on their News Feeds, and 14 million does not translate to concurrent viewers.
Facebook reported that 2.5 million people watched at least a minute of the coverage. However, that statistic was limited to Facebook's U.S. audience.
Yet, the data is evidence that millions are tuning into Facebook for live video viewing and follows in the company's effort to secure more video ad dollars, most notably from television spending, via its audience of 1.71 billion monthly active users.
The shift comes nearly a year after Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg pitched for TV ad dollars. “We have a Super Bowl on mobile every day,” Sandberg said during an onstage presentation for New York’s Advertising Week in September 2015.
“We have a Super Bowl on mobile every day."
Twitter is also trying to make itself a destination for live video as it secures more broadcast deals. The microblogging site is streaming 10 National Football Leagues Thursday night games in the fall, for example.
Twitter's video app Periscope also was a hub for live video streams of Trump Tower. One Periscope video taken on a mobile phone and streamed across the street from the Tower has generated more than 700,000 views.
Importantly for Facebook, news outlets are following along in its experiment. Broadcasters included some of the largest networks such as CNN, Fox News, ABC News and Univision simulcasting coverage on Facebook and their TV channels. Online outlets NowThis and BuzzFeed, for example, took advantage of their social reach to stream the event.
For CNN, the affair garnered a record number of views, 4.7 million, while the broadcast was live on Facebook. That was also a record for Facebook.
The future sustainability of Facebook Live remains to be seen. For now, news outlets like CNN are not earning revenue from advertising. Instead, Facebook is paying news organizations (Mashable is a paid partner).
The crown for most viewed video on Facebook Live does not go to a breaking news event or to a paid partner. Candace Payne, also known as Chewbacca Mom, garnered 71 million views in the first 24 hours after posting her video of trying on a Chewbacca mask and laughing uncontrollably. Those were not all viewed while she was recording live, however.
That video has since generated more than 160 million views on Facebook.
Topics Facebook Donald Trump
Kerry Flynn is a business reporter for Mashable covering the tech industry. She previously reported on social media companies, mobile apps and startups for International Business Times. She has also written for The Huffington Post, Forbes and Money magazine. Kerry studied environmental science and economics at Harvard College, where she led The Harvard Crimson's metro news and design teams and played mellophone in the Band. When not listening to startup pitches, she runs half-marathons, plays with puppies and pretends to like craft beer.
