Facebook's Video Revenue Sharing Model – What It Means For Creators?

According to Cisco, by 2017 video will account for 69% of all consumer traffic! This is no surprise considering the fact that YouTube receives more than 1 billion unique visitors every month and Facebook claims to have clocked a staggering 4 billion video views per day on an average in the first quarter of 2015! With video becoming the key source of information and entertainment needs of the people, it is high time businesses; especially small and medium sized ones; turn their attention towards this mode of marketing. Till recently, YouTube was the most dominant player in the online video business. But with the arrival of video ads on Facebook, it now faces some serious competition!

Facebook has just joined the race by offering video publishers an opportunity to mint some serious advertising bucks. It is going to add in-line autoplay ads which will appear in between the videos in its ‘Suggested Videos’ feature. This initiative is aimed mainly at smartphones, which account for 75% of video views on Facebook. But right now, the feature has been rolled out only for its iPhone apps and it’ll soon be followed by Android devices and the web.  

Here’s how it works – When a user clicks on a video in their regular news feed, the‘Suggested Videos’ feed will surface and it will offer relevant videos that the user might like. These videos will be interspersed with autoplay advertisements. And just like YouTube, Facebook will take a cut of 45% of the ad revenue generated from the feed. The remaining 55% will be split among the creators of the videos that were watched in the feed, based on the amount of time spent watching the respective videos. There are currently, two methods of charging – Pay By Impression (a view is counted as soon as the video starts playing) or Pay For Views (a view is counted after 10 seconds).

YouTube has been the home of internet video for almost a decade and with this initiative, Facebook has definitely upped the ante. However, there are still some wrinkles in the   plan that have to be ironed out. It has to come up with a methodology to pull down copyrighted video content, like how YouTube did it with its Content ID feature.

Whatever the case, video ads in Facebook is great news for producers. Just like how YouTube’s Partner Program gave opportunity to video producers to make a successful living from the monetization of their content, this might open up newer opportunities for people on the Facebook ecosystem. Meanwhile, get your video content ready and start building a page or a channel till the time monetization is available for everyone.

The original post was published on Vidooly's Blog. If you would like to know about Vidooly & how can we help to grow your YouTube business, please drop me a note to [email protected]