The good old days of using Facebook to stay connected with your friends and family have long passed. Even users who have switched to Instagram are now moving over to TikTok as the ads just keep on piling up while the tech-giant scrambles to find ways to make more money to give to content creators.
Content creators play a major part in producing content that keeps users engaged on the platform. How users consume digital content has drastically shifted from initial pictures with captions to short-form interactive videos – what we know today as Reels on Meta’s platforms.
Since the introduction of Facebook Reels, it has been one of the only growth trends across its app. At present, Meta sees this as the future of the Facebook platform’s ongoing consumer engagement to remain relative to modern users.
Whether that’s due to more people looking to watch Reels, or Meta pumping more of them into feeds, is another question – but clearly, Meta’s keen to double-down on Reels content, which also means that it needs to offer Reels creators greater revenue share, in order to keep them posting content for users to stay connected.
How does Meta plan to display ads in Facebook Reels for content creator revenue share?
On this, Meta officially outlined some new Reel ad options by publishing an article “Helping businesses grow with AI, messaging and video”, to better explain new forms of income for content creators. As mentioned in the official Meta blog post, Facebook will provide more capacity for brands to tap into the format, while also, ideally, providing a pathway to revenue share for top creators.
The first new option in testing is ‘post-loop ads’ which are 4-10- second, skippable video ads that will play after a Reel has ended. Information regarding when each post-loop ad will play wasn’t made clear whether it would appear after every 4 videos or only on the top-performing videos that Meta’s algorithm would suggest to you.
As you can see in this example, some Facebook Reels will now show an ‘Ad starting soon’ indicator as you reach the end of a Reel, which will then move into a post-loop ad. When the ad finishes playing, the original Reel will resume and loop again.
For content creators who rely on greater consumer engagement for their income, the news couldn’t get better. This counts in addition to businesses who plan on integrating their advertising onto more platforms through interactive ways users consume content.
It does make us question whether this would be beneficial for Facebook’s ongoing growth as the constant pop-up of ads might interrupt user engagement and break the flow of their reel-swiping experience, eventually leading them to switch off the platform.
In addition to saying this, it would be interesting to see what the actual view rates are on such ads if Facebook enables users to use the skip tool. Furthermore, it comes into question if Meta would attribute ad views to the original Reel, and how that could relate to revenue share for Reel creators.
Lastly as noted, it could be a way to monetize Reels content more directly, though the interruption likely won’t be welcome for viewers, and it’ll be interesting to see what the actual view rates are on such ads. It’ll also be interesting to see if Meta looks to attribute those ad views to the original Reel, and how that could relate to revenue share for Reels creators.
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