2014 was a huge year in online video. In fact, video was the driving factor in a lot of decisions that consumers and brands made online. As video continued to rule the conversation online this year, here are a few of it’s breakout moments.

Facebook Video

Facebook took some major strides in displaying video on the platform this year, making videos play easier and more natively within the Newsfeed. As a result, video views on Facebook increased, and smart businesses started using them to their advantage. Heineken is one of the brands who experimented with Facebook video. They concluded that Facebook and YouTube are equal players, and that businesses should consider Facebook as a video platform.

Read more: How To Add A Facebook Video Call To Action

The Ice Bucket Challenge

In 2013 people were making Harlem Shake videos left and right. In 2014, people were involving their friends and creating videos for a cause through the Ice Bucket Challenge. A phenomenon that was grew virally in large part thanks to Facebook’s upgraded video feature. After all the buckets were empty, the challenge ended up raising $115 million for the ALS Association. The Ice Bucket Challenge really was the defining moment in 2014 that showed how powerful the online video is, as well as how accessible it is to everyone.

BuzzFeed Video

BuzzFeed has been making us laugh with lists and gifs for a while, but this year they added video to their bag of tricks. They have turned some of their most popular pieces of content into videos and uploaded them to YouTube and Facebook. They are another brand that is seeing a lot of viewership on their videos because of Facebook’s upgrades. Businesses wanting to add video to their content marketing could learn a lot from how BuzzFeed is making their content visual.

Instagram

Last year, the photo sharing social network Instagram added video as a feature. This year, Instagram is now bigger than Twitter, which was considered to be the top level social network after Facebook. Instagram grew over 50% this year to 300 million active users. There are only two things you can share on instagram: photos and videos. So if your business wants to cash in on this social network in 2015, make an investment in visual content. An easy way to start is to create a photo journal of your business.

YouTube Celebrities

In 2014, YouTube celebrity status started to be recognized offline by traditional media. TV shows like Today regularly had segments with YouTube celebrity contributors, YouTube celebrity Bethany Mota was chosen for the cast of Dancing With The Stars, and YouTube celebrity Zoella’s first novel sold more copies in the first week in the U.K. than any other novel on record. Businesses are becoming active on YouTube not only by creating their own videos, but also by sponsoring these YouTube celebrities whose viewers fall into their target audience.

To say good bye to 2014 (and this blog post) here is YouTube’s year end Rewind video. How many YouTube celebrities do you recognize?