Challenge: Monetizing Facebook Live

On Feb. 24, my wife and I came home from dinner and noticed two helicopters droning above our home in Chatham, N.J., outside New York. Since there were no searchlights, I guessed they were news choppers and something must have happened nearby, a big accident on Rt. 24 perhaps. We went to our smartphones to see what was up.

Rosemary found it first, on WCBS’s Facebook page. From its chopper, the CBS flagship was streaming live pictures of a four-seat helicopter that had crash-landed in an apartment building complex a quarter of a mile from us. It wasn’t bad. The downed chopper was mostly intact and the pilot and the sole passenger had walked away, but WCBS stuck with the story for a good while as the few details dibbled in.

As news, it was no big deal. But it impressed on me just how important Facebook has suddenly become in local TV news. I was aware of the phenomenon from stories we have been aggregating and from our own reporting, particularly in promoting news and news talent.

But nothing makes a trend more real than when you are being personally touched by it — in this case, what accident investigators would call an “off-airport landing” blocks from my home.

This week, our Michael Depp reinforced for me just how important Facebook Live has become in broadcasting with an article on how the Scripps stations have made Facebook its go-to digital platform for breaking news.

At Scripps at least, websites have become an afterthought and Twitter a runner-up. “The audience for Facebook is much larger and more representative of the local news demographic, broadly speaking, where Twitter is more niche,” says Scripps’ News VP Sean McLaughlin. “If you have some sort of video-intensive breaking news situation, Facebook Live is simply a better platform than Twitter.”

Scripps is not alone.

Just over a year ago, Facebook introduced its video streaming service dubbed Facebook Live and invited one and all to give it a try. After some initial resistance, many broadcasters have accepted the invitation and quickly incorporated it into their news mix in one fashion or another.

For the biggest stories, the stations will preempt regularly scheduled broadcasts as they did here in the New York area last week when we were hit with a fluke snow storm. But for everything less than “the biggest,” they will turn to Facebook.

Facebook Live brings new dimensions to local TV news. It gives viewers (users?) a behind-the-scene look at the news as it is happening, which lends authenticity to it, a quality that many believe is lacking in the over-produced newscasts. With Facebook, newsgathering becomes reality TV that’s actually real.

And Facebook allows reporters and producers to interact with viewers in a way that they have never done before. Facebook users are accustomed to commenting and are not shy about it.

I should point out that stations are using it for more than breaking news. Weathercasters have created regularly scheduled shows and built communities of weather watchers around themselves. Some newsrooms have hosted panels to comment on — and solicit comments on — the news of the day.

The website may have turned stations into round-the-clock news operations, but Facebook is turning them into round-the-clock live TV news operations. That’s good for journalism and good for the public.

But I suspect that it doesn’t come without cost.

Depp compares steaming via Facebook to throwing a “flaming torch” into reporters’ juggling act that already includes producing for websites and newscasts and, let’s not forget, finding out what is actually happening at the scene of the shooting, fire or accident.

Depp says that Scripp’s WFTS Tampa Bay, Fla., sent a reporter to cover a sinkhole. He dutifully started streaming on Facebook right away, but when the station’s helicopter arrived on the scene, the newsroom couldn’t reach him because he was so engrossed with the social medium.

Something, you would think, has to give. And, if so, it will be the regular newscasts, and that’s not good because they account for half of stations’ revenue.

The problem with Facebook is that it imposes a burden on the newsrooms and doesn’t contribute much if anything to paying salaries and the other bills.

Right now, the thought is that a robust presence on Facebook will somehow translate into more visitors on the websites and more viewers for the newscasts where those numbers can be monetized through advertising. Broadcasters are trying to devise ways of migrating their Facebook audiences to their revenue-generating platforms.

Despite the effort, we have no evidence that any station is making more money as a result of its aggressive use of Facebook.

Facebook understands the problem. And the once ironically non-communicative company has opened up. It is working with broadcasters and other legacy media, trying to understand their businesses and come up with an equitable way to cut them in on the advertising revenue that their content is helping to heap on Facebook. It reported revenue of $26.8 billion in 2016.

Last month, Facebook reps met with broadcasters in Dallas and Atlanta about how to use and monetize Facebook. Next week, they will meet with others in Seattle (March 28) and San Diego (March 30).

One of Facebook’s promising initiatives is Ad Breaks, a way for broadcasters to interrupt their live broadcasts with 15-second spots. It’s a concept that broadcasters are familiar with. In fact, they invented it nearly a century ago. My questions (and those of every broadcaster, I’m sure) are, will it work smoothly and what’s the split.

Broadcasters will race ahead with Facebook Live, breaking through the limits of broadcasting, providing countless additional hours of local news and, not incidentally, forging a closer relationship with their viewers. Making the most of the tools on hand to report the news as fast as they can to as many people as they can is a basic journalistic impulse that is hard to suppress.

Here’s hoping that revenue, in one way or another, eventually catches up.

Harry A. Jessell is editor of TVNewsCheck. He can be contacted at 973-701-1067 or here. You can read earlier columns here.