Facebook To Push More Videos On News Feed In Bid For Monetization

Facebook has been trying to monetize its video platform since its launch and now, the social network plans to start pushing more of the content on users’ News Feeds. This would supposedly allow it to compete more directly with other video streaming services such as YouTube and would encourage interest in episodic clips.

The social media giant made the announcement via blog post, which included details on how it plans to monetize the content. Since this is Facebook, the money is generally going to be coming from ads and it is testing a few methods to make this model viable.

“We are updating News Feed ranking to improve distribution of videos from publishers and creators that people actively want to watch. With this update, we will show more videos in News Feed that people seek out or return to watch from the same publisher or creator week after week — for example, shows or videos that are part of a series, or from partners who are creating active communities. Engaging one-off videos that bring friends and communities together have always done well in News Feed and will continue to do so,” the post reads.

As for the ads themselves, it seems Facebook is finally ready to test out pre-roll ads on its videos, Engadget notes. These are basically ads that play before the video starts, which viewers on YouTube would be familiar with, by now.

Historically, Facebook has been reluctant to actually go all in on this model for fear of viewers opting out of watching the videos that pop up on their feeds. If the feedback from this test is encouraging, the social network could start rolling it out in force. Pre-roll ads will only play on the Watch platform, for now, which is where users go with the intention to watch videos.