From the archive. First published in September 2017. Rewritten for clarity, with a note on what happened afterwards.
Facebook launched Watch in the United States in 2017 as a destination for shows, funding original programming from publishers including Vox, BuzzFeed and Discovery, and positioning it squarely against YouTube for advertising budgets shifting away from television.
How that turned out
Watch never became the YouTube competitor it was pitched as. Destination video, where people deliberately choose a show and sit down to watch it, was never Facebook’s natural behaviour. Funding for original programming was wound down, and the strategic weight moved elsewhere.
What actually worked was the opposite model. Rather than asking people to choose a video, Facebook built a continuous stream of short video they did not choose, and placed advertising between the clips. Reels, in other words. By 2025 Meta reported that Reels over one minute accounted for more than half of Facebook watch time, and Reels time spent hit record highs through 2026. Facebook has steadily consolidated all its video under the Reels banner.
What this means for a page
- Video is now the main route to reach on Facebook, but through recommendation rather than subscription. Your followers are not the primary audience for a Reel.
- Watch time is the currency. Not followers, not even views.
- Longer works better here than on Instagram. Analysis of millions of Facebook Reels found engagement and views rising with length, peaking around two to three minutes, which is the opposite of Instagram’s curve.
The general lesson
This is the third or fourth time a heavily promoted Facebook product has been quietly deprioritised within a few years. Anyone building a business on a platform feature should assume the feature is temporary and the platform is permanent. Value a page on its audience and its content, never on a product surface that happens to be favoured this year.
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