Video on Facebook is swallowing the entire social network. According to CEO Mark Zuckerberg today, Facebook videos notch more than 8 billion views daily. That's double what the average view count was back in April and eight times the amount of daily video views the platform had in September 2014. That's an astonishing rate of growth. But it's not inconceivable when you consider Facebook now has 1.55 billion monthly users and more than 1 billion people who use the service every day, according to the company's third-quarter earnings today.

It's worth noting that Facebook counts video views differently than competitors like YouTube. On the Google-owned video service, a view is counted only if a viewer lets the video play for at least 30 seconds. On Facebook, that number is three seconds, and video owners also have the benefit of Facebook's autoplay feature, which triggers a play whenever a user scrolls past a video in their News Feed. Facebook can also prioritize video by tinkering with the algorithms that determine what users see. Still, however Facebook is counting the video views, the growth rate can't be denied.

Facebook wants the News Feed to be mostly video

Facebook's vision for its social network is a site that is increasingly consumed by video. The strategy aims to turn Facebook into a one-stop-shop for online communication, news, entertainment, and all variety of other web content that gets shared on the internet. Facebook ad product lead Ted Zagat said as much on a panel in September, noting that the shift to a video-first platform will take one or two years. The company has even begun testing a video-only feed within its mobile app, as well as a way to shrink a video down to continue watching it while scrolling through the News Feed similar to YouTube's mobile app.