Facebook to start mid-roll ads on Videos published at the social platform

Facebook is, reportedly, to start testing “mid-roll” ads in videos uploaded on its social platform, intended to generate revenue from the increasing audience and split it with the publishers.

According anonymous sources, Recode has reported that Facebook is about to start testing video ad format that will give publishers an option to inject ads into the videos they upload. The ads will appear after people have watched the video for over 20 seconds as well as the video has to be at least 90 seconds long in length.

Just like YouTube – currently the largest player in the video platform with ads, Facebook is also said to share the revenue with the publishers as 45-55 respectively as the publishers will get 55% of the ad revenue. That’s the same number YouTube is offering to the content publishers.

It’s worth mentioning here that Facebook has been offering mid-roll ads already with live videos. This report suggests to fill pre-recorded videos with ads in middle of the run time.

While Facebook has been aggressive with videos on the social platform, it won’t allow pre-roll ads on the videos which play before the actual video starts. YouTube on the other hand is offering a wide range of ad formats which publishers can customise.

Even though Facebook has not commented on the report, the recent aggressiveness of the social network with improving and introducing new video features makes enough sense to believe that Facebook might think of making money from the videos people have uploaded on the platform in a lot for previous years.

This is yet to seen how much trouble this may cause to YouTube as no implication reference have been seen how Facebook will deal with ads and how publishers would benefit in real. As well how much customization publishers will be playing with while inserting ads into their videos.