Video has taken over Facebook. Daily views on the platform growing four-fold to a whopping four billion in just a year. But until now, video creators haven’t had a way to make money on the platform. Let us discuss how to earn money through Facebook ads.
That changes today. The company introduced its plan to monetize videos and share the revenue with creators. Facebook’s revenue split with creators is the same as YouTube’s. 55% of the money earned from ads goes to the creator and 45% to Facebook. The program begins with “A few dozen” partners, including Tastemade, NBA, Hearst, Funny or Die, and Fox Sports.
“Partners say they’d publish a lot more if they could get the benefit of distribution but also make money,” says Dan Rose, vice president of partnerships at Facebook (FB, -0.20%).
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Facebook’s revenue split is slightly more complicated than YouTube’s “pre-roll” ads that play before videos. That’s because Facebook videos play automatically with the sound off. Auto-play pre-roll ads would annoy users, so the company created a whole new environment to show people videos, and in turn, video ads.
Now, when a Facebook user goes to watch a video on mobile, they are taken to a screen with a black background that automatically suggests more videos to watch afterwards. (It’s called, in Facebook’s straightforward naming convention, “Suggested Videos.”) After a few videos, the user will see a video ad. The ads are not attached to any one piece of content, but rather floats between them like a TV commercial. One key difference is that, unlike Facebook’s autoplay videos, these ads will have the sound on, since users are already watching the video with sound.
Facebook will split revenue from ads watched between all videos watched in a single session, determining the payouts by how long the viewer spends with each video. So, if you watched a one-minute video from Funny or Die and a four-minute video from Fox Sports with an ad in between, Funny or Die would get a fifth of 55% of the ad revenue and Fox Sports would get four-fifths of the 55% of revenue.
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Facebook has tested the “Suggested Videos” product with a small portion of iOS users over the last few weeks. Today the test goes wider, and it will expand to more users in the coming months. Android and desktop will follow, says Rose. Suggested Videos users “a way to go into a more immersive experience,” he notes.
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