And Pandora to digital video and BuzzFeed to Snapchat. A new study from the VAB claims to make these cross-platform comparisons buyers have been craving for years.
The app’s purpose is to prompt users to create and share more video content, the Wall Street Journal reports. Like Snapchat, the app’s current prototype opens to a camera view, and reports indicate it will also enable live streaming. Facebook won’t comment on the app, and sources indicate it’s still deep back in the pipeline. Journal subscribers can read the full story here.
Social News Desk’s Kim Wilson is a veteran of numerous f8 conferences, and she says this year’s marked Facebook’s most intensive reach-out to media. Here, she looks closely at presentations on Facebook Live and Instant Articles, the game-changing implications of both for publishers and the journalism and monetization opportunities within them.
Evidently, the reason is that Facebook is chafing at the NFL’s traditional ad model, as it likes its streaming videos to be commercial-free. Verizon, Yahoo and Amazon are still in the bidding, though the smart money sure isn’t on Yahoo there.
Media companies are swooning over the possibilities of posting live video to Facebook, a feature made widely available two months ago. For years, companies have searched for ways to unlock three tough questions: How do you attract people to live online videos? How do you reach people on their mobile devices? And how do you get more out of Facebook’s 1.6 billion users? However, despite the appeal of the nascent product, any revenue gain for broadcasters remains a vague promise.
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It’s a move that could take social live streaming completely next-level: Facebook and several publisher-partners have developed equipment that can integrate into control rooms and allow for multiple cameras, remote segments and more polish. The move would take the rough-hewn immediacy out of live streaming and potentially cajole many more broadcasters to distribute video on its platform. Facebook will reportedly announce the development at its F8 developers conference next month.
Dan Rose, Facebook’s VP of partnerships, says the company is in discussions with the NFL about securing rights to live-stream games and has reached out to Hollywood agents to bring actors, athletes, music artists and others into its live-streaming fold.
KGO Gives Viewers Live Behind-The-Scenes Look
Facebook, Amazon, Verizon and Yahoo (at least in a perfunctory gesture) have all submitted bids to the NFL for the rights to stream up to 18 regular season games. Apple, however, doesn’t think the draw is strong enough to set its Apple TV box apart from the rest, and is abstaining.
Facebook said Wednesday that its Instant Articles platform will be open to anyone — from individual bloggers to any other newsroom beyond the hundreds that have already been participating — as of April 12. Benjamin Mullin reports on what the opening floodgates may mean — a deluge of publishers moving into the space to stake their own claim or a slow building on a phenomenon that will only gain momentum with this move.
The social network plans to begin automatically putting captions in video ads running in its news feed, which play automatically with the sound off by default, to reduce the negative noise without silencing ads’ effectiveness. The automatic captioning is part of Facebook’s push to reduce the friction in getting people to check out the content that appears in their news feeds, particularly on mobile.
Mobile ads grew 82% year over year to generate 80% of the company’s $5.6 billion in ad revenue in the fourth quarter.
KTTV Demos How Stations Use Facebook
When Nielsen launched its Twitter TV Ratings in the fall of 2013, it hoped to measure a great deal of the conversation about TV shows taking place in the social-media sphere. Now the company will have to contend with a lot more chatter. The company will expand its work to Facebook, and, at a later date, Instagram, and will measure aggregate-level conversation related to TV shows taking place in posts shared with friends and family, with followers and with the public at large.
The social network has been experimenting with category-specific versions of its news feed that take posts that would normally appear in the all-in-one feed and organize them into their own interest-specific feeds. It began the test in October and now appears to be extending it to mobile.
WPVI Gets Engaged With Viewers On Facebook
The three most important words in broadcasting are “news,” “video” and “live.” The industry can emphasize its relationship to these words and values by making them a central component of our Web identity.
Facebook will unveil a news notifications app dubbed “Notify” next week in partnership with some high-profile media brands. CNN, Mashable, CBS News, The Washington Post and Vogue are the inaugural partners for the app.
Some of the most important real estate in presidential politics is actually right in front of your nose. Or under your thumbs — it really depends on how you log onto Facebook. The social network is now a key place for campaigns to advertise. One reason for that: It’s getting easier and easier for campaigns to target those ads to very specific, tailor-made audiences.
Facebook has been going hard after marketers’ TV budgets, and with some success. Now, it’s coming armed with research from Nielsen suggesting it’s a better reach medium than TV for millennials and Hispanics coveted by so many marketers
Facebook wants to see the relationship between its site and live TV content grow even more interconnected. Today, the company showed off a number of tools and resources that it has been working with broadcast media partners on, including polling for live events and a number of new APIs that will allow partners to display specific Facebook content streams with much more ease.
For years, Facebook has wanted marketers for large brands to spend more on its social-media platform when planning out television-based, integrated advertising campaigns. On the eve of the Advertising Week in New York, the tech giant is introducing a purchasing product dubbed TRP Buying—which references the metric called target-rating points (TRPs). The TRP Buying system leans on Facebook’s partnership with Nielsen’s Digital Ad Ratings division, which will verify how well the social site’s video ads perform in conjunction with TV spots.
Facebook will start testing a new type of mobile ad on Thursday that it’s referring to as “immersive experiences.” The ads will give advertisers the ability to create fully-branded, interactive destinations featuring full-screen video, product information and other content.
How To Prevent Newsroom Facebook Hacks
There are plenty of steps newsrooms can take to safeguard their Facebook pages against hackers. Guest columnist Kim Wilson walks through the basics — including never sharing credentials or login information — and what to do if hackers still break through and hijack a news organization’s most important social platform.
Researchers predict $3 billion in ad spending for the next election cycle, but unless local media want to cede a big share of that to Facebook, they need to capitalize on the targeting resources available to them. Matthew Davis explains how local outlets can get a ground game with their present targeting capabilities, and what’s at stake if they don’t.
Over the next month, Facebook plans to add new features to its “dynamic” product ads, including cross-selling abilities and Audience Network availability. In addition, businesses will soon be able to show products to users who have purchased a similar or complimentary item.
More bad news for Twitter: Facebook is working on a standalone breaking news app. Details are still vague and Facebook won’t comment, but early screen grabs have surfaced and users will be able to choose partnering publications to follow.
Facebook will begin test flights of a giant, solar-powered drone to help deliver Internet connectivity to remote parts of the world, Brandon Bailey reports. The drone can fly at high altitudes for up to three months, weighs less than 1,000 pounds and has a 140-foot wingspan.
Further positioning itself as a DVR for Web content, Facebook is testing a “Watch Later” button on select desktop videos. The experiment comes a year after the social giant debuted Save — a feature that lets users save any type of content they find in their News Feed. Given Facebook’s immense size, the DVR-like options clearly threatens many ontent platforms from YouTube to Instapaper.
The share of Americans for whom Twitter and Facebook serve as a source of news is continuing to rise. This rise comes primarily from more current users encountering news there rather than large increases in the user base overall, according to findings from a new survey by the Pew Research Center. The report also finds that users turn to each of these prominent social networks to fulfill different types of information needs.
“Freebooting,” the a practice of lifting videos from YouTube and reposting them to Facebook, has grown rampant over the past year. The freebooters gain attention, while Facebook’s video views have proliferated.
A report on the world digital news from Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found that 41% of respondents, representing 12 countries including the U.S., use Facebook to read and share news during any given week. And traffic from Facebook to publishers has also increased: The report found 42% growth in Facebook shares of news content in January 2015 from a year earlier.
New research from Lehigh University suggests readers have mixed viewers about journalists interacting with them on Facebook. On the one hand, self-disclosure and interacting with commenters can lead to a more positive views of journalists, but journalists can also take a hit to their professional reputations by responding to comments.
Facebook Inc.’s latest employee is Kevin Martin, former FCC chairman. He will manage policy for the company’s mobile and global access efforts as it seeks to get more people online. Martin, who had been consulting for the past two years, is joining as Facebook’s vice president for mobile and global access policy.
Through New Brave World, NewsBeat Social, a distributed news organization that produces 70 one-minute videos a day, has been selling pre-roll video ads on its Facebook-bound videos. Jordan English, founder of New Brave World, said NewsBeat Social has been running ads for IBM and Intel and that a campaign for Visa is on the way.
Facebook Not A Tool For TV Video Teases
Dale Blasingame argues that TV newsrooms need to stop using Facebook as a platform for video teases of their stories, Rather, they should post a Facebook-specific video version of the story, along with some excised sound or a more personal recap from the reporter.
Facebook is planning to host an event in New York on April 22, nearly a week before the NewFronts kick off. At the event, to be held at Facebook’s officers, the company will provide an overview on its push into Web video over the past year or so, said people familiar with the matter.
Facebook has expanded the capacities of LiveRail, its video ad server, to display mobile ads, enabling publishers to now sell both video and display ads on their mobile apps. The improvements also mean LiveRail will use its anonymized data to serve better targeted ads off the Facebook platform, and publishers using LiveRail will be able to add Facebook’s user data into the mix to get a better idea of who’s watching the ad.
