Facebook Adds 3 New Ways to Make Money With Video Content

Facebook is launching three updates aimed at helping creators of video content make more money.

The latest changes to Facebook’s video monetization options include:

• Earning revenue from short-form video.
• Expanding eligibility to more content creators.
• Making it easier for creators to earn money from viewer contributions.

The ability to earn revenue from videos published to Facebook is available to Pages that meet a certain set of criteria.

Since the criteria has now been updated, let’s look at that first.

Updates to Eligibility Requirements

More Pages will be able to monetize their videos with ads after updates to Facebook’s eligibility criteria.

Facebook has separate sets of requirements for each type of video ad: In-stream, Live, and Gaming. Each set of requirements is getting updated.

In-Stream Ad Eligibility

In-stream ads refer to ads shown either before or during a video.

To be eligible to run in-stream ads, Facebook Pages must have:

• 600,000 total minutes viewed from any combination of video uploads in the past 60 days. This can include regular video uploads, live streams, and recordings of live streams.
  5 or more active video uploads or previously Live videos. Videos must be published, not deleted, and compliant with our Facebook’s Content Monetization Policies.

Previously, Facebook only considered regular video uploads over three minutes in its calculations for eligibility requirements. Now it also considers shorter video uploads, live streams, and recordings of live video.

In-stream ads continue to be available to Pages with at least 10,000 followers. They are not available to personal profiles.

Earn Money From More Types of Videos

Pages can now earn money from videos as as short as one minute, which grants the option to run a 30-second ad that Facebook says is “minimally interruptive.”

Previously, only videos of 3 minutes or longer could be monetized.

Videos exceeding 3 minutes can include mid-roll ads, which are shown while the video is playing instead of before the video starts.

Mid-roll ads can now be shown after 45 seconds into the video, which is a slight update from the previous checkpoint of 1 minute.

Live Stream Ad Eligibility

Facebook has separate eligibility requirements for Pages interested in monetizing live streams.

In addition to meeting the criteria in the section above, Pages will have to meet another requirement to run ads while going live: 60,000 live minutes viewed in the last 60 days.

Facebook notes that watch time for recordings of live streams will not count toward meeting this eligibility criteria.

Earn Money Directly From Viewers

When Pages are eligible to run ads in live streams they’ll also be able to earn money with Stars.

If you’re familiar with Twitch’s ‘Bits’ then you will immediately understand the concept of Facebook’s ‘Stars.’

It’s a form of digital currency that users buy with real money and send to creators to reward them for their content. Creators will then earn a share of the revenue from the Stars they receive during a stream.

Facebook is expanding eligibility for Stars to 15 more countries. Over the coming weeks Facebook will start testing the ability for creators to earn Stars from non-live videos.

Content creators can check whether their Pages are eligible for any of these monetization programs in Creator Studio. Pages can apply for the programs in Creator Studio as well.

Facebook says it will review all applications and gradually start accepting more Pages that meet its new criteria.

Source: Facebook Newsroom