Facebook start video advertising

From Thursday, December 19, Facebook will offer video advertising on its site. A decision may reshuffle the cards market today mainly monopolized by YouTube.

According to recently released by Google and from various specialized firms (including eMarketer) figures come extrapolations, YouTube video generate 1.7% of global advertising revenues with annual turnover of 5.6 billion dollars. Net of expenses and reimbursements to authors, the platform would release close to 2 billion dollars a year net profit. Also according to eMarketer, YouTube would account for 20% market share of the video and its sales have increased by 65.5% over the previous year. The ranking of the most popular websites, the platform is in 3rd place behind Google (the search engine) and Facebook.

Given these figures, we understand why Facebook wants to take its share of this very large cake. According to the Wall Street Journal, Facebook hopes to capture a significant share of the 66.4 billion dollars spent each year by advertisers on American television. According to our confreres WSJ, the first pub should be a teaser for the film "Divergent" and it will automatically play in the news feed subscribers, whether web or mobile platforms, on a duration of 15 seconds.

It is now several months since Facebook video advertising was announced but the decision to launch was postponed several times due to technical reasons. Mark Zuckerberg personally supervised this project and would have considered that the platform was not technically accomplished and there was a risk of losing users because of videos too long to load that would have disturbed the users. Also according to the WSJ, Facebook could charge 2 million dollars a day to reach the entire Facebook audience aged 18 to 54 years.