Facebook announced that it would roll out its own video on demand service mid last year and indeed on 10th August, 2017; Facebook Watch became available only in the US, but with a promise to expand it progressively to the rest of the world later.
Facebook Watch was clearly made to compete with YouTube, but also to provide creatives with yet another platform on which to share their content and earn from it.
It has been over a year since it was announced and now, Facebook Watch has reached Uganda and the rest of the world. If you have recently updated your Facebook mobile app, you will notice that there is a new icon that resembles a TV.
Tap that icon and it will take you to a string of videos that you can watch one after another. (You can check your Facebook, I will wait.)
So what is Facebook Watch and why is it even important? Well, according to Facebook, they intend to do a couple of things with it such as:
1. Create more room for creatives to express themselves with short form videos as well as long form TV like series.
2. Get more people to spend time on Facebook
3. Make more money for the platform
With Facebook Watch, the viewers will be shown an advertisement in the middle of the video (after about 20 seconds). The ads are how Facebook can monetize the product, the revenue from the ads will be shared between Facebook and the content creators with the creators getting 55% of the revenue while Facebook keeps 45%.
Facebook will also be investing in some of it’s content partners by providing funding to create videos. The social media giant is willing to spend from $20,000 to $70,000 for short form videos and between $250,000 to over $1 million for the TV like series on the platform.
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