Facebook Watch goes global
August 29, 2018
Facebook is rolling out Watch, its video-streaming service, globally effective immediately. It comes a little over a year after its US launch.
Users of the site, which looks set to take on the likes of YouTube, will be able to choose from a range of shows – from both established brands and new players – and have the ability to view clips saved from their News Feeds.
The social media giant plans to allow all content creators to feature advertising breaks, so long as they hit certain metrics. Until now, only select publishers had been given the opportunity.
To begin with, only videos shown to audiences in the UK, US, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand will have this facility. The revenue split will be 55 per cent to the creators and 45 per cent to Facebook.
Facebook also revealed it will spend up to $2 billion itself on creating original content for Watch.
Commenting on the news, Kirsty Brice, Director of EMEA Marketing at 4C Insights, said: “This is the leap advertisers have been waiting for. It’s been on the cards for some time with the Premier League deal Facebook signed earlier this summer, and at the start of the season it’s the perfect time to roll out the platform for users. Facebook has been going from strength to strength in recent months, with ad spend up 26 per cent Year-on-Year in our latest report. New developments like Story Ads continue to draw advertisers to the platform and any fallout from Cambridge Analytica was not apparent in our data.!
“It’s also an interesting move in the wider context of platforms such as Amazon colluding broadcast entertainment with social and ecommerce. It’s important for advertisers to remember that while each platform appears to be closing the loop on audiences, the reality is that we now live in the age of the consumer. Prospects can happily switch from Facebook to Snapchat and then Amazon, changing device as they go. Multi-screen viewing is the new reality. While marketers have started to adopt cross-channel campaigns, to truly market the way that consumers consume, they must master a platform agnostic, audience-centric approach,” she concluded.