Facebook video ads have been rumored alongside the rollout of auto-playing videos, and today the social network announced its first ever video ads.
Partnered with Summit Entertainment, an American film studio responsible for mega hits like Twilight, and Mindshare, videos promoting the upcoming film “Divergent” will appear in News Feeds.
Here’s how Facebook says the video ads will work:
- Rather than having to click or tap on the content, videos will begin to play as they appear on screen — without sound — similar to how they behave when shared by friends now. If you don’t want to watch the video, you can simply scroll past it.
- If the video is clicked or tapped and played in full screen, the sound for that video will play as well.
- At the end of the video, a carousel featuring two additional videos will appear, making it easy to discover more content from the same marketer.
- On mobile devices, all videos that begin playing as they appear on the screen will have been downloaded in advance when the device was connected to WiFi — meaning this content will not consume data plans, even if you’re not connected to WiFi at the time of playback.
Facebook stresses that this is a limited test, and is not disclosing pricing details at this time.
According to a Business Insider article published today, video ads could generate $800 million in revenue over the next three years, according to two analysts.
There has been talk that video ads could command $3M+ daily and we estimate video ads could represent as much as 5% to 10% of Facebook’s advertising dollars in 2014, depending on how aggressively Facebook rolls them out.
For Facebook users on mobile devices, to help with data usage, you can set videos to only auto-play while connected to WiFi.
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