Facebook has started a new video content initiative dubbed Anthology. Anthology will be made up of content creators like Vice, Disney and The Onion that create video content for brands. This video content will then be distributed through Facebook media.

Video will succeed on Facebook if it proves to be something that people want to watch, and Anthology gives Facebook a degree of control over the content and user experience with trusted third-party content creators given access to Facebook’s troves of data. The social network also benefits by requiring a commitment of at least $2 million per campaign of which Facebook keeps at least 50%.

Beyond the monetary and user benefit, Anthology makes Facebook’s vision for video a bit clearer.

Videos with Stopping Power

There’s a lot of conversation around Facebook vs. YouTube when it comes to who is winning (or who will win) when it comes to video.

Without question Facebook has quickly grown from nothing to something with video. It now receives 4 billion video views per day, and it only started to put a focus on video late last year. Facebook aims to continue this growth, but it’s path will be different from YouTube's.

Facebook video and YouTube are different platforms and different experiences.

Facebook is about discovering video serendipitously. Video is fed to users through their feeds. YouTube, on the other hand, makes video the destination. Users seek out the content on what is the second most used search engine out there. Those videos are sought, not fed.

This major difference affects how the two even calculate views. Facebook videos, for the majority of users who haven’t turned off the feature, play automatically, which means Facebook counts a view as any video that plays for three or more seconds. A user may be scrolling through her feed and scroll past a video. However, if that video is on her screen for three or more seconds, that’s a view.

YouTube being a destination experience, counts a view as anything that is user-initiated. The user clicks play. They’ve opted in to watching. That’s an important distinction when comparing these two platforms, their popularity and their views.

A video on Facebook is short-lived. Searchability on the platform is limited, and if a video doesn’t show up in your News Feed, there’s a good chance you won’t see it ever again, unless, of course it finds its way in your feed once again. That’s where YouTube stands out. Videos there are findable for the long-term, not discoverable for the short-term.

There’s a Place for Both

Facebook or YouTube? At this point, the two are pretty different. One is a feed that delivers on discovery. The other a search engine made up of multiple destinations for users. That means both platforms hold a ton of potential for marketers who want to create content people will enjoy once they see it along with content people will naturally seek out.