Despite its obvious success, YouTube’s long been regarded as something of a loser in the video-sharing community because of its clips’ poor visual quality. It looks like there’s a new contender in the huge selection/iffy picture category, however, as it turns out that at least 40 percent of the videos uploaded to Facebook come from webcams.
Liz Gannes reported that statistic after talking to Chris Putnam, a software engineer at Facebook. She also wrote, “Facebook receives some 260,000 video uploads per day, with 155,000 of them from webcams,” which works out to about 59.6 percent. So it looks like the ratio of webcam clips to other ones must be rising all the time.
This has its downsides, of course – Facebook, which is supposed to be looking for another $100 million in funding, will have a hard time monetizing clips of college students’ drunken wailing. Plus it’s less fun to watch friends when they’re blurry to the point of almost being anonymous.
On the other hand, the clips cause Facebook users to spend at least a little more time on the site, and their low quality should allow Facebook to save on storage and bandwidth costs.
High quality video options are available for Facebook users who want them, too, so it’s not like people have been deprived of a choice.
