Facebook ranked second largest video site

Topped only by YouTube, Facebook zooms past Yahoo!, VEVO, and Fox to claim second place ranking

Facebook, increasingly underestimated as a major force in rich media, ranked second on a list of the top online video content properties by attracting 58.6 million unique viewers in August, according to data released by comScore on Thursday. Each user viewed 20.5 minutes of video on average.

Of course, the social networking service has quite a ways to go before even approaching the statistics for Google Sites, particularly boosted by YouTube’s unfaltering popularity. The leader in online video, Google saw 146.3 million unique viewers in August, each watching an average of 4.5 hours.

Filling out the rest of the top five properties, after Google and Facebook, were Yahoo! Sites, VEVO, and Fox Interactive Media, with 53.9 million, 45.4 million, and 43.1 million viewers respectively. Notably, VEVO viewers watched an average of 69 minutes of video, more than any other property on the list (minus Google).

When people think about the most popular video sites, names come up like YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion (a France-based site quite popular in Europe that didn’t make comScore’s US-focused list), and Metacafe. A site like Facebook, branded as a social networking service, doesn’t necessarily scream video hub.

And yet, because social interaction takes place between friends on Facebook (as opposed to strangers on YouTube), the site has snowballed into one of the biggest video sites in the United States.

“The basic thing that we’ve found from building social apps and this platform ourselves is that almost any experience or app can be better if it’s social and it has your friends with you,” said CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a recent interview. “And we just expect there to be really tremendous disruption over the next five years. We’ve seen this with a bunch of the apps that we’ve built. Stuff like photos and events and groups — we’ve built pretty basic versions of those apps to start but they ended up being so much more used because of their social integrations.”

Make no mistake, YouTube is a social site. But the strategy behind YouTube, and this is the opposite of Zuckerberg’s plans for Facebook, is to first host a really great video platform that will attract all the users and then build social tools on top of that platform for users to interact with each other. Facebook focuses first on building a strong community and then letting them take the site where they may. If the community gradually starts uploading and watching tons of videos, then in turn, Facebook too will gradually fine-tune its video platform.

Interaction with close friends trumps random comments with unknowns, and that’s maybe why Facebook has a shot at becoming the number one video hub in the next five years.