Facebook Reportedly Planning To Start Showing Ads In The Middle Of Videos

Facebook is testing out a brand new feature that will allow content publishers to generate greater revenue.

Recode, citing unnamed “industry sources”, on Monday reported that Facebook will soon begin showing ads inside videos, a la YouTube.

Dan Rose, the social network’s vice president of partnerships, said: “It’s very, very early, we just started testing it, but we’ve seen some promising results”.

Video content consumption on Facebook has soared in recent years, so the revenue-generating potential is considerable and will potentially provide publishers with a new lucrative earnings stream. It also started to pay out publishers and celebrities to use Facebook Live and create live videos. The move is seen as a way for Facebook (and publishers) to make money from videos, which the company claims will make up 70 percent of all traffic on its platform by 2021. The ads themselves will be no more than 15-seconds long.

On that note, not everyone thinks that this development is a good move by Facebook.

The social media giant is now juggling the idea of investing in original shows and other content, entering a game that currently Amazon and Netflix dominate.

Facebook declined to comment on the specific parameters.

Next time you watch a video on Facebook, your viewing might be interrupted by an ad. And it now appears Facebook is going launch a new effort to turn those videos into cash registers.

Midroll might lend itself more easily to integrating the ad into the rest of the programming – so for Newsshooter it could mean having a more distinct introduction, cutting to an ad and then resuming the video. For example, some advertisers want the ability to explicitly specify which publishers’ or creators’ videos they do or do not want their ads to run against when buying pre- or mid-roll ads, according to one agency exec.