Dive Brief:
- Digiday has reported that certain premium publishers, such as the BBC and Mashable, are part of a program where pre-roll video ad income is shared evenly between Twitter and its publisher partner.
- For those publishers, pre-roll video ads on their content earn significant revenue, unlike the same on Facebook.
- One unnamed publisher who works with Twitter and Facebook said, “We’re making virtually nothing from Facebook’s suggested video platform, which is all revenue-share based.”
Dive Insight:
The major difference between Facebook and Twitter is Facebook doesn’t run pre-roll video ads, a format that Digiday reported Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is personally opposed to because of the “terrible” user experience.
Jonathan Wilner, vp of product and strategy at video technology firm Ooyala, told Digiday, “Advertisers are used to buying TV, and used to buying ads, in a particular way right now. So there’s lots of budgets out there for buying pre-roll, and that doesn’t change overnight. But if advertisers are interested in reaching gigantic audiences, then Facebook will make them change their systems.”
The report comes at the same time that Facebook posted quarterly earnings that smashed expectations, helped by its video ads. Also this week, AdWords rolled out six-second unskippable pre-roll ads on YouTube that Google said in testing have performed well in top-of-funnel activities such as recall, awareness and consideration.
From the marketers’ perspective, video ad dollars will follow engaged audiences whether that comes via pre-roll ads on Twitter or suggested videos, or maybe a new ad format for live streaming content, on Facebook.