Most people used to post their videos to youtube and then use facebook to promote their work. But now filmmakers and social media stars are cutting out the middleman and posting their viral efforts right to their facebook account. The Likes and Views these videos generate help make their parent pages “stronger” and more popular. For instance, here is a video that Russel Brand uploaded to Facebook. (It’s a story about his phone being stolen and then returned while he was in India.) The video has been Liked 34,796 times, it’s been shared 16,992 times and it’s been viewed 1,724,573 times. If you sort your news feed by “top posts” then a video with stats like that will almost certainly appear at the top of your feed. But Facebook’s algorithms will also reward Brand for all those likes, views and shares by boosting the exposure of his future posts. Basically Facebook detects that Russel Brand’s content is popular so they automatically show more of Russel Brand’s stuff to more people.
Of course these views aren’t exactly true and genuine Views with a capital V. As Antonin Scalia would say, there’s a little Jiggery-Pokery going on here. Facebook Video exploded last year when the site enabled a new auto-play feature. Even if you don’t click on Russel Brand’s video, it will start playing if you skim past it in your news feed. So thanks to those Auto-Plays, Facebook now garners Four Billion video views a day.
Youtube passed the 4,000,000,000 views a day mark back in 2012 and now sees close to Eight Billion views a day. But Four Billion views is still pretty incredible and a whole lot of content creators and celebrities have been waiting for the day when they could actually start making money from their facebook views. Well that day is finally here…..um, sort of. On July 1st, Facebook announced their preliminary plans for video monetization. At first only a few select people or production companies like Funny or Die and Fox Sports will be invited to participate in the program. And if things go well, eventually you and me and your Grandma Rose will be able to enable ads on our Facebook videos. Facebook’s terms will be the same as youtube’s; 55% or revenue will go to the creator and 45% will go to the site.
Head to Fortune.com or more details (and an explainer video): http://fortune.com/2015/07/01/facebook-video-monetization/