Were you aware of the fact the Facebook paid publishers to stream on their Facebook Live application? Well, they are currently still issuing payments for live streams, but that might soon come to an end. Some of you might get upset hearing about this, as you apparently missed your chance to earn big bucks, right? No need to get angry, as these payments were issued only to big time celebrities and popular media publications. Facebook has been paying celebrities and media publishers like BuzzFeed, the New York Times and Forbes to use its live video product for the past year, in order to promote their new application. Currently, those agreements are reaching their one-year mark, and Facebook says it hopes to transition those publishers to a revenue-sharing model instead of just paying them outright to make live videos.
“When we talked about it with people up front, we told them we were going to pay for the first year. That’s kind of ending around now.”
– Dan Rose, Facebook’s VP of partnerships.
Now, Facebook will incentivize publishers to create longer stuff the same way it did with live videos — by paying them. Facebook has a history of paying content creators to jumpstart new formats. It currently pays virtual reality developers to build for Oculus, for example, and Rose says the company will do the same to get publishers creating longer videos for the video tab.
The ultimate plan is for those deals to be temporary, though.
“Our goal is to get it seeded and then move to a model that scales over time with rev-share. Our business model in all of these areas is going to be rev-share, and that’s our hope with live as well.”
Mr. Rose also mentioned that the new rev-share model would also target normal videos, and in time, the feature of monetization will be enabled to all Facebook users, not just major publications. This move is a direct attempt at taking some of YouTube’s user base, but will it work? Only time will tell. We’re pretty excited to hear about Facebook’s revenue share program, as publishers across the world have been patiently waiting for this to finally happen.