Vevo doubles registered user count since switching to Facebook-only login; CEO hints at further integration

Music video service Vevo has doubled its total registered users as a result of switching to Facebook-only login and adding more personalized features in March, Vevo CEO Rio Caraeff tells us. The company is also looking at other ways to partner and integrate with Facebook, including advertising. Vevo gained as many registered users in 60 days as it had previously taken two years to acquire. Although Caraeff won’t reveal the exact total of registered users, he says it is in the single-digit millions. Vevo has also seen a 150 percent increase in referrals to its website from Facebook and a threefold increase from Facebook mobile to Vevo’s mobile apps since March. “The results have been great,” Caraeff says of the company’s Facebook integration. “It’s been absolutely the right move for our business.” In January, Vevo launched integration with Facebook Open Graph so that users can automatically share their viewing activity with friends on the social network. In March, it overhauled its website and eliminated the option to log in with services besides Facebook. Although Vevo doesn’t require users to log in to watch videos, it has added a number of features for those users who do. For example, it will create personalized playlists based on users’ Facebook activity and profile information. The company also launched a Facebook canvas application to give users the option of searching, viewing and sharing videos directly from the social network. Caraeff would not comment on Vevo’s current business arrangement with Facebook besides saying that Vevo is whitelisted to sell and serve ads within its canvas application, as seen in the screenshot below. “We hope to have an even bigger business of ads with them in the future,” he says of the social network. For ads served within videos hosted on YouTube, Vevo gives 35 percent of revenue to Google. That means when Facebook users share YouTube links to Vevo videos on Facebook and their friends see an ad before the video plays within News Feed or Timeline, Google is the one that collects ad revenue, not Facebook. Facebook has significantly expanded and diversified the list of third-party apps and websites that integrate its platform since launching Open Graph in September 2011, but so far it hasn’t taken any steps to directly monetize them. Besides the likely expansion of its Credits payment system, of which it takes a 30 percent fee, Facebook could also introduce an ad revenue sharing model. Rumors that Vevo would end its deal with YouTube and switch to one with Facebook began to circulate earlier this year after some outlets reported that Vevo was having meetings with representatives from the social network. Caraeff says Vevo has a good relationship with both Google and Facebook, and that the company’s strategy is to be ubiquitous across platforms and devices. “We want to have music wherever the fan wants it to be,” he says, pointing out that Vevo is available through apps on connected TVs and it syndicates content on a number of other sites. “We’re not telling our audience where to go and we’ve never tried to say our videos should not be available somewhere.” Still, Facebook is a powerful driver of traffic and engagement, and Vevo and other apps and sites are looking for ways to benefit. Caraeff tells us he’s interested in doing even more integration with Facebook, though he could not discuss the specifics of any potential new features. “We want to integrate Facebook more natively with features that are available now or in the future,” Caraeff says. “What we really want to do is enable a continuous-playing, long-form experience.” Vevo has seen a 750 percent increase in the number of stories being published to Facebook and a 50 percent increase in Likes and comments on those stories since March. The mobile integration has led Facebook to become the largest traffic driver to Vevo’s app download pages. Caraeff says the company is also working on an HTML5 version of its app, which will allow visitors from Facebook and other mobile environments to watch Vevo videos without first downloading a native mobile app. Vevo currently has 770,000 monthly active Facebook users, according to our AppData traffic tracking service.

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Vevo doubles registered user count since switching to Facebook-only login; CEO hints at further integration

Brittany Darwell

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Brittany Darwell