Facebook Live launched widely on the social network two years ago.
Jason Cipriani/CNET
Facebook Live has racked up 3.5 billion broadcasts by hundreds of millions of people since it launched two years ago, Facebook‘s head of video said Friday.
And nearly 2 billion people have watched a live broadcast, which is basically everybody who uses Facebook regularly. (The company’s latest figure is that 2.14 billion people check Facebook at least once a month.) And the average number of daily broadcasts in the last year has more than doubled the average in Facebook Live’s first year.
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Fidji Simo, the company’s head of video, shared the stats in a profile post Friday, in what may be an annual tradition of looking back on the Facebook Live product to mark its anniversary of becoming a widely available feature. Facebook made live streams available to public figures before the product was widened to all its users two years ago.
Fidji Simo is Facebook’s head of video.
“Through Live, we learned how truly social the video experience on Facebook can be, generating 6x more interactions than regular video,” she wrote.
Over the last two years, Facebook has prioritized video — and particularly live video — in its algorithm recipe for the top of your News Feed. But Facebook Live has had its problems. Facebook offers a nearly unrivaled audience, but as the company makes its broadcasting tools more accessible, scenes of violence have also grown more common.
Simo said Friday that the company has “earned some tough lessons.”
“The immediacy of Live brings unique challenges, and we have committed to improving how we handle them,” she said. “We have made significant progress over the past year: we’re reviewing live video more quickly, more thoroughly, and more accurately. But our work here is not done, and we’ll continue to do more to protect our community.”
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