New York, Oct 17 (IANS): Videos on Facebook are fast catching up with YouTube in terms of number of shares and the social networking site may overtake YouTube in video sharing through its news feed soon, say researchers.

An analysis based on 20,000 Facebook pages and 180,000 posts over one year found that Facebook is now a real threat to YouTube in terms of video consumption.

"The content marketers are directly uploading video content to Facebook, meaning that Facebook is retaining the traffic at the expense of YouTube," reported Socialbakers, a social media analytics company, on its website.

"This is a big deal for YouTube. They could lose a big percent of their distribution," Jan Rezab, CEO of Socialbakers, was quoted as saying.

This means users will stay on Facebook instead of leaving, he added.

According to the report, "Marketers are going to continue to use the network that is most effective for gaining engagement. Basically, there are no signs of the trend reversing from its current path."

In September, Facebook announced that it was serving up to one billion videos a day.