Facebook reports that users watch 100 million hours of video per day, so it’s not surprising that Facebook is looking for a way to monetize all those videos on the platform. There’s a lot of potential revenue that could be generated by showing ads to a large audience of faithful Facebook users. However, Facebook first has to figure out the best way to put video ads into its users’ News Feeds.
In 2015, Facebook made a designated video section and allowed some publishers to receive revenue from ads ran in that section. Last year, Facebook started to make its video service more publisher friendly after Buzzfeed requested that Facebook allow publishers to create advertiser-sponsored videos because the company’s Tasty videos weren’t profitable enough.
Like YouTube, Facebook is giving 55 percent of ad revenue generated from a video to that videos publisher. This deal was worked out in response to publishers complaining that they were not generating enough revenue from Facebook videos.
Since Facebook has yet to find the perfect way to sneak video ads into the videos users watch as they scroll down their News Feed, the company is continuing to experiment. Currently, Facebook requires ads to be longer than 90 seconds in order to be eligible for the ad program. If your video meets that requirement, Facebook will run an ad during the video after 20 seconds. These ads will be 6 seconds or 15 seconds.
Having an ad break in the middle of a video may eventually work, but Facebook isn’t there yet. Many users find it frustrating that, while there is a warning telling you a video is coming up, the video is randomly place. It’s not uncommon for an ad to start in the middle of a sentence.
For the ads placed in the middle of News Feed videos to not get on everyone’s nerves, Facebook is going to have to encourage publishers to make videos that have natural breaks, which is the standard network television and basic cable have already established.
