Facebook isn't really known as a video site, but today Jay Z and Justin Timberlake made music video history by premiering the video for "Holy Grail" on Jay Z's Facebook page. It was directed by Anthony Mandler and it's a beautifully shot and directed video. It will be available exclusively on Facebook for the first 24 hours after release.
There are a few odd things about the choice of where to premiere the video. First of all, like I mentioned, Facebook isn't really known as a video source. Their player is a little clunky and lacks a few basic features, such as the ability to display view counts, which are pretty much the main metric we have for tracking a video's popularity. All we get is the share count and comment count, which is readily available information for any URL (we track on the site under "Popularity Data"). Putting it on Facebook before YouTube also seems like an invitation to have a lot of illegitimate copies of the video floating around that YouTube has to clean up.
Facebook was on many people's short lists for sites that could take YouTube's place if their contract with Vevo were to expire, so maybe this is a test by Facebook to see how this works or maybe this is just management trying something new. Either way, Facebook has a limited feature set for music videos and seems like a tough sell for a music video venue.
That being said, Mashable makes a good point that this goes directly to Jay Z's 17 million Facebook fans. We can't help but think that a Facebook post sharing the YouTube video would have done the same thing.
Check out the video below:
