Nieman Foundation at Harvard
HOME
          
LATEST STORY
For the first time, two Pulitzer winners disclosed using AI in their reporting
ABOUT                    SUBSCRIBE
Aug. 10, 2017, 12:19 p.m.
Business Models
LINK: newsroom.fb.com  ➚   |   Posted by: Ricardo Bilton   |   August 10, 2017

Facebook’s ongoing ambitions to push into video have been belied by a single uncomfortable truth: most people don’t go to Facebook expressly to watch video. Instead, for most Facebook users, video is just one content form appearing in the News Feed, without them explicitly seeking it out.

Facebook is making an effort to change that with Watch, the video destination page that it announced late Wednesday. Appearing as a dedicated tab on Facebook, Watch will be home to both 5- to 15-minute short-form videos, as well as longer, TV-style half-hour programs produced by creators. Like YouTube, the product it most closely resembles in its mission, Watch is designed to make it easier for users to discover and follow ongoing video series. Facebook will both personalize video recommendations, and highlight series under criteria like “Most Talked About,” “What’s Making People Laugh,” and “What Friends Are Watching.”

Publishers, as you might expect, are eager to get involved with the effort, which holds the promise of being a viable new revenue stream. Mid-roll ads will be a part of the equation down the line, with Facebook collecting 45 percent of ad revenue, according to TechCrunch.

The Atlantic, for example, is producing two series for Watch: “Animalism” will cover new animal discoveries around the world, while “Myths You Learn in School” will debunk some of the more persistent half-truths taught in classrooms. Mashable, too, is producing a pair of shows, “What’s Your Mutt?” and “DIY Costume Squad.” Business Insider is creating four shows, including one starring Neil deGrasse Tyson. And Quartz will create shows “that follow compelling characters and groundbreaking science shaping the future of the global economy.”

Facebook says that Watch will work for a wide variety of shows, including programs that engage fans, shows that have a consistent narrative or theme, and live events (Major League Baseball, for example, will broadcast one game a week on Facebook).

Facebook is opening up Watch to a limited number of users and video creators for now, with plans to expand things after its initial testing.

Show tags
 
Join the 60,000 who get the freshest future-of-journalism news in our daily email.
For the first time, two Pulitzer winners disclosed using AI in their reporting
Awarded investigative stories are increasingly relying on machine learning, whether covering Chicago police negligence or Israeli weapons in Gaza
“We’re there to cover what’s happening”: How student journalists are covering campus protests
“We don’t come in when there’s something crazy happening and then leave when it’s over. This is just what we do all the time. And I really hope that makes people trust us more as a newspaper.”
Screenshots are one big winner of Meta’s news ban in Canada
“We observe a dramatic increase in posts containing screenshots of Canadian news stories in the post-ban period.”