Facebook videos will have ads in the middle

Do you hate those pre-roll ads on YouTube that start before the video you want to see and can only be skipped after a few seconds? Good news, then - Mark Zuckerberg hates them too. The bad news? Well, his social network is planning to introduce another type of ads that might prove to be even more annoying.

We're talking about mid-roll ads. These are apparently coming to Facebook videos, and they will interrupt what you're watching. The mid-roll ads will be shown after you've watched a video for 20 seconds. Thankfully they will only be available for videos that are at least 90 seconds long, but they still have the potential to make people stop watching Facebook videos after those initial 20 seconds.

Such mid-roll ads have so far been tested for live videos, but the new rollout will include all videos on Facebook. Facebook will be sharing ad revenue with the content creators, keeping 45% of all sales for itself - just like YouTube does. For now, this is reportedly just entering the testing phase, but if that proves successful then expect every single video you see on Facebook to become ad-infested pretty soon.

This would represent the first chance many publishers will have at monetizing their Facebook videos. Facebook users are already watching 100 million hours of video per day, so this will also bag the social network some nice amounts of cash.

Source | Via