• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, June 17, 2019

Traditional TV companies' new streaming efforts will continue to eye upstart wannabes like Facebook. But what does all this have to do with digital video advertising competing for share of market?

The dominant social media platform now says its Facebook Watch has more than 720 million visitors monthly — 140 million who spend at least one minute on the service per day, resulting in visitors spending more than 26 minutes in Watch every day.

But the Facebook data may be misleading. Those Watch minutes are not all continuous throughout the day or month, Facebook confirmed to CNBC.

One analyst believes the continuing strength of Facebook — despite a host of fraud, viewability and possible regulatory issues — won’t stop the company. In a few years, Facebook Watch will pull in some $5 billion a year in video advertising revenues.

And remember — this is just a sideline business to a company currently pulling in $59 billion in revenue a year.

How does this affect traditional TV companies starting up premium video OTT services? Possibly not at all. For example, there are many non-advertising platforms currently on the rise — as well as some limited advertising services, from NBCUniversal and others.

One Morgan Stanley analyst recently backed up claims from Walt Disney concerning its overall OTT projections, coming this November as part of its big Disney+ push.

Disney is on track to get to 130 million global subscribers by 2024, and around 60 million to 90 million of these will be in the U.S.  For the week, on this positive analyst news, Disney stock rose 2.6% for to $141.65.

And Facebook? On Thursday, after the news of a possible fast-growing Facebook Watch, the company’s stock was up 1%. And that wasn’t even the good part.

The following day the company’s stock added another 2.2% to close at $181.33 — up 4.7% for the week overall — due to its announcement of a new cryptocurrency. Globalcoin will be used to make payments on Facebook and elsewhere on the internet.

That's big news for advertising on new digital video platforms — either on premium TV series or in more bite-size video on social media sites.