‘Facebook Live’ Commercials, Live Video Ads To Become A Thing

“Facebook Live” has been exploding in popularity recently, but there has been the question of how the social network would monetize the feature. It seems the answer lies with live video commercials, much like how traditional TV ads have always run.

The feature is still in its testing phase right now, but Facebook has confirmed to Adage that ads interrupting live video streaming are something that they are thinking about implementing. The ads will only appear among select videos right now, so it’s not likely that a lot of viewers will see the changes in the next few days.

Facebook has been relying more and more on ad revenue from its video feature since it has proven to be particularly lucrative for them, Tech Crunch reports. So it’s only natural that the social media site would add ads to Live in order to monetize the feature.

Now, the question is how exactly this is going to work for the long term. Will live streamers know exactly when the ads will kick in and say “We’ll take a quick break” or something of the sort? This isn’t exactly clear.

For now, the ads are quite short, with the longest duration being 15 seconds and will appear 5 minutes or more into the stream. The publishers who were allowed to stream ads are few in number right now, as well, which works for the test phase quite well.

Brands have full control over the ads that they will run, Digital Trends reports. They can choose not to run the ads if they want, but this would mean that they won’t be able to earn money from their live streams.

There has also been no confirmation as to how long the test phase is for and if the ad method is a sure thing. With limited options on monetizing “Facebook Live,” however, the social network might have no choice but to go with this route.