DMA Digital Diary: Is Google’s dominance waning?
Facebook is still leading the social media roost, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center. But the most interesting piece of news that came this week was that Facebook’s video product is getting better. This points to a change in user habits as they move on from Google’s popular video platform, YouTube, which has been dominating the video scene for quite some time.
The company recently released figures that in just one year, the number of video posts per person has increased 75 per cent globally and 94 per cent in the US. Globally, the amount of video from people and brands in News Feed has increased 3.6x year-over-year.
A company post said, “We’re increasingly seeing a shift towards visual content on Facebook, especially with video. And with people creating, posting and interacting with more videos on Facebook, the composition of News Feed is changing.”
In an October 2014 report by SocialBakers, YouTube was clearly ahead of Facebook in terms of video content in the beginning of the year. But as the year progressed, content marketers increasingly started uploading videos on Facebook directly. This led to a 50 per cent increase in May and July in the number of videos uploaded on Facebook. The Facebook videos are now trending to surpass YouTube by the end of the year, the report highlighted.
Another highlight of the week was that Yahoo search share grew in December 2014, while Google Search recorded its lowest figures since nine years according to StatCounter. This could be attributed to the new deal between Yahoo and Mozilla which made Yahoo the default search engine on Firefox.
Google fell to 75.2 per cent in December from 79.3 per cent a year ago. Yahoo on the other hand rose to 10.4 per cent from 7.4 per cent.
Another worrying news for Google is that its browser, Google Chrome lost out the first position to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer in December 2014. While Internet Explorer rose to 40.17 per cent in December from 31.09 per cent in November, Google Chrome fell from 34.99 per cent in November to 29.97 per cent in December 2014. StatCounter is still investigating the reason behind the rise in Internet Explorer’s usage.
Thus it seems that Google needs to watch out for its competition – whether it be for search, videos or the browser to maintain its dominance.
