It’s not like we were holding our breaths for it, but for months the “watch” tab has appeared and disappeared without warning, like it was trying too hard to create expectation and make us all talk about it. Well, mission accomplished and the news of Facebook Watch going worldwide called, even if for a couple of seconds, the attention of creative teams from many news outlets.
After many trials and months of availability in the US, we can all finally go directly to the “watch” tab where we can find video material with various themes and creators; depending on the video we choose we’ll see many other related content unfold in our smartphones, tablets and even Smart TVs. But we’ve seen this before, haven’t we?
A second YouTube?
Every change the social network has had tells a little bit more of the struggle it is to maintain the users interested on its content, even though it is one of the most used apps and social networks to watch video daily, Youtube is still at the lead, at least for younger audiences who think YouTube is “like a TV”.
YouTube already has, and this is from a couple of months ago now, social options for creators like “community tabs” that give them the opportunity to listen closely to their community to know what they would like to see on every episode; this option was capitalized by Facebook on the trials of “Watch” allowing their users to see what their acquaintances have seen and shared.
This accomplished that 50 million people in the US monthly consumed video content for at least a minute, also let’s remember that the rate of video reproduction is around 7 and 8 seconds, we could say it’s a great step for this format.
Monetization shows its ugly head
Like everything Facebook touches, Watch wants to become profit, after enjoying great success during the trials in the US, it seems to them like a good idea to charge monthly fees for certain channels or “Ad Breaks” right in the middle of the most watched videos, however to create such breaks the creator must fulfill certain criteria and within that criteria we find: creating videos that last longer than 3 minutes and have gotten at least 30,000 views in the last two months and having more than 10,000 followers, which for bigger content creators won’t be a problem, but for the smaller developers it won’t be less than a nightmare.
What is Facebook telling us? OK, I’ll give you a change to make free ad breaks, but only if you have 10,000 followers, so you have to push for growth in your community, maybe even intervening… Either way for Facebook this is still a win win.
Sources
www.socialmediatoday.com
www.theverge.com
www.adweek.com