Facebook is going to start showing ads in the middle of its videos.
Facebook have been featuring many videos and advertisement for its huge user base. The upcoming addition to it would be inclusion if advertisement in the middle of the video. For over 100 million hours viewers watch videos per day, this seems to be a big reason to incorporate ads in between. The ultimate target is to earn more and come up with profitable scheme each time. As per the sources, Facebook is going to test this new platform by allowing video producers to place ads in between the videos and someone must watch it for at least 20 seconds. That’s how they will be qualifying the videos to be injected with ads or not.
From now on, Facebook will be selling the ads and 55 percent of the revenue will be shared with the publishers. It’s just as same as the one being offered by YouTube that currently is the leader of online video advertising business. This feature would be beneficial for those who have placed their ads immediately after 20 seconds the video been played. Though the time duration has not yet finalized but it looks like 90 seconds would be the minimum time duration of the videos.
See also: 10 Tips to increase Likes, Reach & Engagement on Facebook.
Background
Even a year ago, Facebook offered publishers to upload sponsored videos, among the few was Buzzfeed’s Tasty Unit, which aimed to earn few dollars. But soon it came to knowledge that they didn’t make as much as expected. Apart from this, Facebook has come up with similar projects for the publishers, recently Facebook created a section of video and a revenue share was allowed for some publishers to gain from the standalone video ads particularly in that section.
Transformation and development
After trying these methods, Facebook has rolled-out this feature so that it can make the most out of these videos being shared on its News Feed, which is its primary mechanism of distribution. That’s why it’s expected to create an impact. This time, it’s more about the time spending on the ads rather than the quantity of videos being viewed. Facebook has given more importance to the time viewers spend on watching videos rather than the number of the videos they go through. The new mid-roll ad theory seems more sensible and traditional, like the Television commercials that used to appear after a fixed interval. While in case of the pre-roll and post-roll ads, viewers were compelled to watch them. This would be a reliever for the viewers and equally challenging for the publishers to sustain viewership, to earn their profit share with Facebook.
Impact
Earlier, Facebook used to consider ‘video view’ even if it’s viewed for 3 seconds. Though it’s a controversial topic as per some media experts, Facebook used to play such videos automatically as soon as they pop-up in the News Feed. And since then it was a topic of discussion until now, when Facebook has decided that ads will run only once a video has been watched by the viewer for minimum 20 seconds. Plus the ads would appear only if the video will be running for 90 seconds or more. Therefore, from publishers’ point of view, Facebook is trying to convey that the videos must be of some sustainable substance so that the viewers can be hooked to it for a while, else viewers would lose interest and ultimately publishers would lose money.
