New Age Of Ultron Trailer Pitches Facebook Against YouTube

So, the long-awaited Avengers: Age of Ultron trailer (the second one) finally dropped this week. What better chance to test how well Facebook video performs versus YouTube, than to release the trailer on both platforms simultaneously? How fitting… Battle on the big screen – battle for video dominance.

You may have heard recently, that Facebook is doing rather well in the video department (uploads in December 2014 surpassed YouTube’s) – Facebook builds engagement a lot easier so this does make sense.

Also Read: Facebook Video Will Be Huge This Year – Here’s Why

Anyway, it’s unclear if Marvel released the trailer on both platforms as a way to do some A/B testing, but for all of us out there it’s the numbers we are interested in. What happened? Which platform came out dominating? Well, within 24 hours, the video had over 12 million views on both combined – that’s a lot. Now for the breakdown.

#Marvel released the #AgeOfUltron trailer on both Facebook and Youtube. Which do you think did best?

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At first Facebook showed more views – the video was seen a lot faster on the platform with over a million views within the first hour. Then later on YouTube caught up. In all, and at time of writing this, YouTube had 20,480,297 views versus 6,866,888 on Facebook. It just goes to show that while Facebook is able to rack up views very fast and play an important role in making content travel in general (it’s easier to share), YouTube starts off slow and remains super valuable in the end.

#Facebook is able to rack up views very fast and play an important role in making content travel.

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To use Facebook for video is in itself quite a gutsy move, yet it seems to have paid off. On Twitter, content is very easy to miss, on YouTube you don’t get much “live” stuff going on (better used as a library of content), whereas Facebook might be a happy medium.

Views aside, the trailer had over 175k likes on Facebook versus over 130k likes on YouTube showing a clear dominance of Facebook in terms of creating engagement. Still, YouTube didn’t actually do bad at all. It just goes to show that Facebook might just be catching up very fast…

What do you think about YouTube versus Facebook video? Which platform do you think will dominate and why?