Social-Media
Facebook is experimenting with a new way for creators to monetize their Stories: sticker advertising.
Yoav Arnstein, director of product management, told The Verge that he can't reveal the test's developer or advertiser partners because it's still in the conceptual stage. The larger idea, he said, is to give advertisers a natural place to suit their content, such as a sticker promoting a local business if someone posts a video from Yosemite National Park. According to Arnstein, the contextual importance of these ads would likely be critical to their success.
The story stickers are just one of today's improvements to the company's creator website. It's also bringing back its in-stream advertisements for shorter videos. Previously, only three-minute or longer videos were allowed.
These advertisements could previously only be used to monetize videos that were three minutes or longer, but now one-minute videos will receive ads that will be inserted 30 seconds into the material. Ads may be placed as early as 45 seconds into videos longer than three minutes.
Pages that post these in-stream ads must have 600,000 cumulative minutes viewed in the last 60 days from some combination of video uploads — on-demand, live, and previously live — as well as five or more active video uploads or previously live images. Meanwhile, in order to monetize via in-stream advertising, live video producers must now have 60,000 live minutes watched in the last 60 days.
Facebook is also investing $7 million in promoting its Stars feature, which allows viewers of live content to tip virtual stars, each of whom pays a cent to the producer. During some live streams, the company will distribute free Stars, which viewers can give to the video hosts. The team will also introduce viewers to the concept of sending virtual gifts.
About why Facebook is investing in the Stars, Arnstein says, We want to allow more people to actually go and experience this joy of actually going and supporting a maker, and we think this is a relatively new behavior that we want to make more widespread across the app, and we think this is a great way to do that.
We believe that this will also help incentivize developers to experiment further with the types of content and direct fan interaction that will encourage and incentivize this form of direct fan support.
Finally, Facebook is adding 24 new countries to its paying live events and ten new countries to its fan subscriptions. Neither of those features would generate sales for the company until at least August 2021.
All of these announcements point to Facebook's desire to monetize as much creator content as possible through advertising. The Stories sticker has the most potential, particularly for Instagram, and could usher in a new era of social media.
The Stories sticker has the most potential, particularly for Instagram, and could usher in a world where full-screen ads are less prevalent and ads embedded into content are more prevalent.
