The fact that videos on Facebook are viewed approximately 4 billion times a day has motivated the social media giant to earn revenue from video ads in addition to its content. Facebook is offering 55% revenue sharing with publishers for ads that appear with their videos. This is being seen as an open challenge to YouTube since Facebook is offering the same rate as YouTube offers to its publishers.
This move however has not shaken YouTube at all since it does not consider Facebook videos as a threat although publishers will be lured to display videos directly through Facebook instead of first sharing them on YouTube. Additionally, Facebook is working with a few media companies along with video creators and doing a monetization test run for a few brands including NBA, Funny or Die and Fox Sports. It has been done on its iOS app and will soon be tried on the Android app as well. The competition will intensify when video creators will see this as a revenue making machine rather than just getting a huge audience on the social media platform.
This video ad program called Anthology is aimed to take advantage of the humongous count of video views on Facebook and earn additional revenue along with existing content. In the near future, users might see a section called ‘Suggested Videos’ in their News Feed; which on clicking will display videos recommended based on the previously watched ones. The videos will auto play as they are being scrolled with advertisements displayed in between. One ad will be displayed intermittently in every three videos. In this case, the 55% revenue will be divided among the three video creators depending on the duration each video was played for by the user.
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YouTube does have an advantage over Facebook with its star’s page for dedicated followers where fans can instantly watch their latest clips. However, Richard Broughton, research director at Ampere Analysis said that users are likely to seek different types of videos on Facebook that what is hosted on YouTube and calls the move ‘gamechanging’ for content partners.
Although the views on Facebook are expected to exceed two-thirds of YouTube’s projected total this year, YouTube hasn’t shown any sign of being offended or challenged as it believes both the companies have a wide scope of growth in the future in the coming years.
Facebook’s initiative to become a video platform is definitely going to challenge the leader of the video advertisement market and cannot be ignored.
