Why Facebook wants your live Video

Trying to predict where technology and media will be in five years time is not that easy — just ask the “Year of the Mobile” soothsayers — especially when you consider the pace of innovation from IoT to VR.

Facebook however has firmly placed its bets on video.

It was in 2014 when Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook’s first community town hall announced that by 2019, most of Facebook would be video. Three years to go, then.

Between Google and Facebook, it is estimated that nearly 75% of every new dollar spent on digital advertising goes to these two online giants. Video is a high yield major growth area and Google has YouTube, so it could be argued they have a bit of a tailwind. Facebook have to play catch up, no pun intended.

Facebook launched Facebook Live in Autumn 2015.

It’s a bit of a misnomer — as the ‘live’ piece lives on as VoD after the ‘live’ event .When the live video ‘broadcast’ is complete, it remains in the user’s feed where it will continue to generate views. Some have experienced more than 300% more views.

This is where it gets interesting.

Facebook doesn’t create any video themselves, so they need to encourage others to do it for them, and Facebook are willing to pay certain publishers for that video content .

Building a credible quality base of video is one thing as it brings more users into video; getting it to go beyond twenty or so creators, can start to get expensive. Just ask Netflix.

This is not new territory for Facebook. For years it encouraged publishers to post their content onto Facebook, where it would drive increased engagement and recruit new audiences. Win, Win.

Then Facebook changed their page rank algorithm which reduced organic reach. They then changed their newsfeed algorithm to prioritise stories other than publishers’ ones. Win, Lose.

The Facebook algorithm has controlled and affected the audiences of publishers ‘off net’ ; i.e. off the Facebook net.

Some publishers have experienced audience traffic losses of up to 75%.

All because of a small update in the algorithm.

So this need for video is potentially good news for publishers, however one would hope that the publishers may have learned from the past. As Facebook needs video content, premium content providers now have a window of opportunity to sell it it to them. Yes sell, not give.

Snapchat for example recognises this and is looking to change its model to licence and away from revenue share — as they recognise the increased cost of acquisition.

Snapchat recognises it has to pay for content,

Zuckerberg doesn’t want to have advertising prerolls on any content (it can be especially annoying going into a live streaming event) as he wants the Facebook user to get straight into the content.

So having ads mid stream is okay then? Well, yes and no.

In August this year, Facebook introduced the ability for publishers to insert 15-second mid-roll ads that would essentially act as commercial breaks for live streams. These are essentially ad injections either in a live or more likely an on-demand environment which can be clunky compared to more sophisticated ad serving these days.

Given that the vast majority of ‘Live’ video comes from non publishers — will they want advertising on their personal videos they only want to share with their friends?

That’s where control and the Facebook algorithm come into play.

The thing about Facebook algorithm is it tends to change more often than the Irish weather.

To quote Facebook -

“Now that more and more people are watching Live videos, we are considering Live Videos as a new content type — different from normal videos — and learning how to rank them for people in News Feed.

As a first step, we are making a small update to News Feed so that Facebook Live videos are more likely to appear higher in News Feed when those videos are actually live, compared to after they are no longer live.”

A small update. That’s what they said about their video measurement.

That’s also the current status of the algorithm -in a short period time it could be all different again.

And that is Facebook’s perogative.

In order for premium quality video production to become a reality for Facebook, the producers of this content will need some certainty of income so as to cover cost and a return.

The algorithm needs to recognise that.