What you need to know
- Facebook announced new ways for creators to make money.
- The company will now let them use stickers to place small ads in story content.
- It plans to expand this tool to more short-form videos in the future.
Facebook is testing new ways of monetizing short form video content, the company announced today. Its first move is enabling support for ads in stories.
Writing in a blog post, Yoav Arnstein, Director, Facebook App Monetization said:
In the coming weeks, we'll begin testing the ability for content creators to monetize their Facebook Stories with ads that look like stickers and receive a portion of the resulting revenue. While the initial test is small, we hope to soon expand to more content creators. And then broaden it to short-form videos on Facebook, eventually providing a way for content creators to monetize this popular content.
The stories format, popularized by Snapchat, has proven resilient enough to appear on multiple platforms, including Twitter and LinkedIn. It makes sense for Facebook to take advantage of it as the company tries to lure creators back from platforms like YouTube and Twitch.
It's also expanding the availability of in-stream video ads to account for shorter content. Now, content creators can have ads placed in videos that are one minute or more rather than needing to be three minutes or longer. There are strings attached though, to be a part of this expanded partnership, creators must have 600,000 minutes viewed in the last 30 days from video — whether it's live, on-demand, or otherwise. They must also have five active and uploaded videos at the time of application.
The company will also now support in-stream ads in live videos for more creators. Previously, it was invite-only. Now, any creator with 60,000 live minutes in the last 60 days can qualify. Finally, it is investing $7 million to drive the adoption of Stars (a virtual currency akin to TikTok's gifts) in live videos. This is aimed at boosting creator revenue and encouraging people to support their favorites.
