Videos are the new area of focus for social networking websites. Facebook is no exception and the company has been attempting to come up with new, innovative way to monetize its videos. Towards the same, the company has announced that it has started testing ad-breaks with a groups of partners and in a bid to lure more creators, has decided upon a 55-45 revenue sharing scheme.
Facebook will keep 45 percent of the total revenues earned, with the creator getting the lion’s share. Meanwhile, the publisher will themselves chose where they want to insert an ad break. They can also experiment with multiple ad-breaks with the only stipulation being that two consecutive ad-breaks need to be spaced at least 2-minutes apart. So theoretically, you can take up to 10 ad-breaks in a 20-25 minute video, provided your content is engaging enough for viewers to sit though them.
What’s more, Facebook has also announced that it is expanding the ad-break testing for live videos as well. If you remember, ad-breaks for live videos were announced back in August but, were limited to a small group of users. Now though, pages that have at least 2,000 followers and have reached at least 300 concurrent viewers in one of their recent Live videos, can deploy ad-breaks into their videos.
So, say a publisher is broadcasting to an audience. Once that audience grows beyond 300 concurrent watchers that have been watching the video for at least four minutes, publishers will see a “You can take an ad break” sign alert alongside real-time comments on their videos. Tap that sign and bingo, an up to 20 second ad break will start playing automatically. From then on, creators can chose to take more ad breaks every 5 minutes.
The new feature has quite a lot to praise. For one, monetization is now as simple as attracting audience and holding them to your video. Which means that creators can now focus their attention upon what they do best — that is creating content — instead of worrying about how to monetize it. That part will now be taken care of by Facebook’s own sales teams who can arguably do it much better.
Secondly, advertisements every five minutes mean that the publishers can take short breaks every now and then and if there is something they would rather do off camera, attend to it while the ad plays, That wasn’t possible earlier, since live videos are, well, live. Your audience isn’t exactly going to like starting at the blank wall while you go off to wet your throat or fix your hair.
Finally, with this move, Facebook has made it ridiculously easy to monetize its platform. 2000 followers and 300 concurrent viewers sounds like a big deal at first, but ithey are not. There are plenty of profiles that fulfill this criteria and Facebook’s latest move will allow them to come up with new, interesting content in order to monetize better. It would also prompt more people to become publishers could potentially cause an influx of content to the social media platform. And of course, the revenue is split it quite generously with the publishers getting the lion’s share.
So yeah, with these new moves, Facebook could have made its platform that much more appealing for video creators and publishers. Considering the gaps between ads, publishers will also be forced to come up with longer videos if they want to use multiple ads within the same video — which could prove to be a bit difficult since people usually prefer watching short clips on the platform. The move could also cause a spike in live video content, an area where Facebook has been hard at work over the past year.
