Facebook wasn’t really associated with video content in the past but that has changed over the last few years. More and more people are watching videos on Facebook every day and the world’s largest social network is reportedly thinking about making money from it. Facebook is expected to start testing a new “mid-roll” ad format for videos on the social network. For users, this means that they will start seeing ads in the middle of videos.
Industry sources cited in a new report today claim that this new ad format will allow video publishers to insert ads in their videos which will come up once someone has watched a video for at least 20 seconds.
It’s also claimed that Facebook will initially sell the ads and share the revenue with publishers by giving them 55 percent of all sales. This is the same split that YouTube offers publishers and it’s currently the leading platform for online video ads.
This is the first proper move that Facebook is making to start generating revenue from video plays on the social network. It also gives publishers more incentive to contribute video content to Facebook because they couldn’t really make any money off of it in the past.
Facebook has been tweaking the social network to put videos front and center and the strategy has been paying off, it said last year that more than 100 million hours of video were being watched on Facebook every single day.
Facebook has not yet commented on this report.
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