Guest post by AJ Segal of Appenue
Facebook has decided to take on Google’s Youtube head-to-head.
Some marketers rejoice, others are concerned (especially the ones that make money off it), but the ones that should be most concerned are Youtube personalities.
A couple of months ago, Twitter has decided to shut down Vine.
Why? Twitter wasn’t seeing the revenue it hoped to see through the acquisition of Vine back in 2012, Twitter thought it could combat Youtube and other services by doing so – it was wrong.
Vine was strong, don’t get me wrong but not even remotely as strong as Youtube.
Youtube had more following and just didn’t need people to download an app so they could record themselves doing stuff.
Yes, I know – what about Snapchat?
Snapchat has a different business model and a different audience as well. Snapchat also allows you to take pictures and make remarks about them, chat and more.
Facebook is afraid of Snapchat, which has already solidified its existence as more than just a successor to Twitter; Snapchat has decided to relocate to London, a bold move especially since the Brexit but it might actually pay off at the end.
But what does it tell us, the marketers that Facebook has decided to go head-to-head with Google?
Ok, we have Facebook live and everything – how does putting ads inside it help anyone?
By offering “mid-roll” ads as opposed to “pre-roll” ads (which Youtube has), which means users would only see the ads after watching 20 seconds of the video, users would be more engaged in the video since they were already watching 20 seconds of it and want to see the rest of the video.
This means that a smart marketer who would upload 5–7 seconds of video ad could make a huge profit (Facebook offers 55% of all sales, just like Youtube) since most people would not turn off the entire video just for an ad that comes up.
This move is smart also because people who use Facebook for podcasts or even avantgarde series, would be able to produce more revenue for themselves as they could get sponsored by advertisers who wish to make money on Facebook.
Facebook had figured out many users are already super engaged with Facebook on a daily basis via its app, looking for relevant queries on it and since it cannot dominate search engines – it could dominate the video world.
If Facebook would be able to disrupt Youtube enough to dominate the scene, it could also use this to combat Snapchat as it would go head-to-head with it via its subsidiary, Instagram which already offers videos up to 60 minutes long but not ads on it either.
We would have to wait and see naturally, but this is really interesting.