Another new year, another new marketing tactic. Facebook now has reportedly started implementing ads on videos being streamed on the social media site, according to an unnamed source as cited by Recode on Monday.
Facebook is likely to introduce ads in a similar fashion like YouTube does, but in the case of the social network, they’ll be added 20-seconds into the video. The ads are also applicable for videos that are more than 90-seconds long at least. As far as revenue will go, just like YouTube does with its publishers, Facebook will sell the ads and 45 percent of the revenue will go to Facebook. Talk about invasive advertising.
Recode had written that Facebook users world over spend over 100 million hours a day watching Facebook videos. And Mark Zuckerberg has decided to scale up revenue out of those hours of streaming. According to PC Magazine, Facebook had introduced brands with the ability of having breaks within their live streams for advertisements. This time around, they’re making it available for all kinds of videos.
Those ‘Tasty’ videos from BuzzFeed are going to be a lot more profitable. Why this works so well for a platform like Tasty is because people actually save these videos to watch again, for reference, adding to the views, as well as the advertisements being possibly shown. But it’ll add to the video’s time, making it pretty annoying to continue watching from where it left off.
There hasn’t been any official word about the implementation of this just yet and Facebook is keeping everything under wraps. Dan Ros, who is the VP of Partnerships mentioned a few months ago, that Facebook is looking to be aggressive in the video bracket, trying to find ways to implement ads in videos that are not live. Seems like they’re very serious about following this through.
Up until now, many publishers on Facebook, ideally the ones who spend their time trying to make videos on their pages, had to do without expecting any money in return. It’ll be interesting to see how these pages will react and the type of content they’ll create for viewers.
YouTube already knows how to play that game. But now that Facebook is joining the club, we’ll just have to wait and see how it pans out for the biggest social media network in the world.
What this means for regular people who use Facebook, is just that they’ll have a lot more ads to deal with apart from plethora of ads already being given to them on their feed.