Watch out YouTube: Facebook making play for music videos

SAN FRANCISCO — Escalating competition with YouTube for eyeballs and ad dollars, Facebook plans to experiment with running music videos in the News Feed, according to published reports.

The test will run through the end of the year, Billboard reported.

Facebook is looking to cut deals with major labels which would choose the music videos. According to the New York Times, Facebook is offering the labels a better revenue split than YouTube and is pledging to remove unauthorized content from Facebook.

Facebook sees video as the next lucrative frontier in capturing and keeping the attention of its 1.4 billion users around the globe and collecting even more advertising revenue from marketers who want to target ads to them.

It's not the only one. Consumers are increasingly watching videos — whether on YouTube or on Facebook — from mobile phones and tablets, creating a fertile new opportunity for marketers to reach consumers.

YouTube is downplaying Facebook as a competitive threat.

Robert Kyncl, head of content and business operations at YouTube, told the Financial Times earlier this month that the online video market was growing so quickly that "it will be a decade before we bump into each other."