Data from the video-intelligence software company Tubular Labs shows that, since Facebook's product launched about six months ago, people have created more than 246,000 live streams, which have garnered over 5.7 billion views. The majority of those streams were posted in the last 60 days.
That might sound tiny compared to the 8 billion overall video views on Facebook per day, but apparently CEO Mark Zuckerberg is "obsessed" with turning the live-video service into a success. Live video has already proved popular on other services, such as the Twitter-owned Periscope. Now Facebook wants in on the action.
So, what kind of things are people actually using Live videos for so far?
There's no dedicated "live" video search function in Facebook yet, but here's a taste of what you can find:
You can say hello to Esther the Wonder Pig! Her owner says that after his first Facebook live stream, he got 120,000 new followers on her page.
"I thought it'd be a good way to get a little more interactive with fans," she tells Business Insider. "It's definitely drawn some people to my page that typically might not have looked at just photos."
One hitch: You need a pretty good internet connection to make it work, which her shop doesn't always have, Cook says.
And here is the most watched "live" video of all time, according to Tubular. Called "Mermaid Pillow," it now has 35.7 million views, though we don't know how many of those occurred while it was actually live.
Jillian was most recently an enterprise technology editor based in San Francisco. She started at Insider as an intern on the technology desk in 2013 and rose to a senior reporter position, covering Alphabet, Facebook, and ecommerce. After three years at the site, she left to spend time freelance writing abroad, before taking reporting positions at CNBC and then at Forbes, where she covered Alphabet, Silicon Valley culture, and artificial intelligence. She returned to Insider in March 2020 and worked on the enterprise technology desk until August 2021. Jillian graduated from Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications with a degree in magazine journalism and information management and technology.
