YouTube plays down threat from Facebook

YouTube has downplayed the threat of Facebook displacing its dominance of online video, saying both companies will be able to grow rapidly for years by cannibalising the television advertising market.

Robert Kyncl, head of content and business operations at YouTube, told the Financial Times the online video market was expanding so fast that "it will be a decade before we bump into each other".

The arrival into the market of Facebook, disappearing-messages app Snapchat and Twitter’s video app Vine is a sign that online video is “becoming mainstream”, but none of them would derail the YouTube juggernaut, he said.

Facebook, which has 1.4 billion monthly active users, has been putting video ads into users’ feeds for more than a year.

On Wednesday it muscled further into YouTube’s territory with a trial to share advertising revenue with video creators who publish on the social network.

Facebook will match the revenue split offered by YouTube, giving content creators 55 per cent of the proceeds of ads that run next to their videos.

Speaking before Facebook’s announcement, Mr Kyncl predicted that YouTube and its rivals would have plenty of room to grow as advertisers continue to shift their budgets away from traditional media. – (c) 2015 The Financial Times Limited