Facebook Watch, the social network’s TV-style service, has gone global. Following an initial launch in the US one year ago the spin-off video platform will be available “everywhere” and Facebook is now courting brands to funnel ad spend its way.
To get on marketers’ media plans, the social network is offering a wider inventory to choose from alongside more original content. It claimed “strong” early results in testing.
Facebook is promising TV-style ‘ad breaks’ that people actually watch to the end. Unlike the news feed, Watch provides a hub with Facebook for longer-form content.
Its original series include Jada Pinkett Smith’s talk show Red Table Talk and National Geographic’s We’re Wired that Way – a show exploring humanity’s oddest quirks.
According to new figures from Facebook, 50 million people in the US come to Facebook Watch to view videos each month and the total time spent within the tab has increased 14-fold since the start of the year.
Facebook also wants to open up more inventory on Watch by lowering the monetisation barrier for publishers – which it splits revenue with at 45%/55% respectively.
Where monetisation on Watch was previously reserved to select publishers, any pages are now eligible for ad breaks so long as they: have been creating videos that are at least three-minutes long and generating more than 30,000 one-minute views overall in the past two months; have 10,000 followers; and meet Facebook’s eligibility standards.
Facebook is also promising more content, working alongside publishers and traditional broadcasters, the social network is forecast to spend around $1bn on owned content for the service by the end of 2018.
Also, with the announcement that Watch is going global, Facebook is giving creators a new ‘loyalty insights’ tool.
The feature includes a fresh metric on audience retention, which will allow publishers and creators making videos for Watch to “better program” content that keeps viewers returning.
