Facebook's Latest Attempt to Take On YouTube
Facebook (NASDAQ: FB) has been angling at ways to get a share of the growing digital video advertising market. YouTube, an Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG) (NASDAQ: GOOGL) subsidiary, is the leader in the market. It brought in over $15 billion in gross advertising revenue for Google last year.
But YouTube doesn't keep most of that ad revenue. It splits gross video ad sales with its creators, typically giving 55% of revenue to video publishers. That's a key incentive to get creators to keep using the platform.
Facebook copied that split with Facebook Watch, but it's failed to attract a lot of creators to the platform. Meanwhile, its Instagram-based sister, IGTV, has been slow to roll out monetization options for creators. That's about to change, however. Instagram started reaching out to top creators to test ad units on IGTV, according to a report from Bloomberg. Ads on IGTV could draw a lot of Instagram influencers to the service, since it presents an easy way to monetize their popularity on the main app.
Source Fool.com
