January 24, 2018
Anne Felicitas
A survey conducted in December of last year found a promising audience for Facebook Watch: Gen Zs and Millennials.
According to the survey by Morgan Stanley, which involved 1,400 US participants aged 16 and older, 40 percent of Facebook users regularly use Watch, and 60 percent of users who are on Facebook three or more hours a day use Watch every week. Participants aged 16 and older claimed to use Watch on a daily basis.
The survey also found that approximately 75 percent of Facebook Watch users watch short-form videos under 20 minutes weekly and nearly 50 percent watch long-form videos that are 20 minutes or longer.
Facebook Watch’s popularity among younger users comes as good news to the social media giant that has been fighting to capture the loyalties of younger users to whom the company’s relevance and future rely on.
Facebook launched Watch in the summer of 2017 in an attempt to increase video content on its platform and declutter News Feed. Watch also competes against rivals Snapchat and Youtube, whose demographics, especially the former, are mostly comprised of younger users.
Watch is a separate tab located on the left column of News Feed, invented exclusively for long-form, short-form, and episodic videos. The shows available to Watch are Returning the Favor, Ball in the Family, Bae or Bail, and RelationShipped. In addition to reality shows and documentaries, Watch also features sports.
Although Facebook has a promising audience for Watch, it is still bested by YouTube, the most widely used video content platform. While 78 percent of respondents said they used YouTube in the past year, only 43 percent said they used Facebook Watch.
