Malawi artists to benefit from Facebook video platform

But this is exactly where the competition between Facebook and YouTube is leading the country's art world to. With over half of the world's population using it, Facebook decided to step up its competition with Google owned video sharing platform, YouTube.

Malawi artists often share on Facebook links to their music videos initially published on YouTube with the aim of driving people to watch the videos.

But through the new approach, which the Guardian newspaper (UK) has called "a big step forward", music video will be published directly on Facebook.

In return, the social network which managed to grow from 1 billion video views per day to 4 billion will serve those native videos (videos published directly on Facebook) on people's News Feed globally.

This will enhance worldwide exposure of the artists as Facebook gears up its fight against You Tube on which platform win the crown as the first destination of on-line videos.

A survey conducted by another tech oriented blogging site found that Facebook native videos are likely to generate more views and shares from people compared to videos shared from You Tube.

So far, Gasper Nali from Nkhatabay has already benefited from this as his video, posted on Facebook by Latinos Post has garnered nearly 10 million views.

Yet, as there has been a rip forward on production and quality, no artist in Malawi so far has commanded this status with a majority struggling to even reach a thousand views on YouTube.

Facebook has also been piloting monetisation of the videos to enable artists earn money through ads beamed on their videos following mounting fears that income made from ads on YouTube could be lost.

In Malawi, Facebook is increasingly becoming the influential source of news and information and the new features of publishing videos will be rolled out through some news publishing pages in a few weeks time.