TV (and User Experience) Beware: Facebook to Sell 15-Second Video Ads for $2.5 Million a Day
We’ve known about it since December, but Facebook appears closer to unveiling 15-second video ads on its site. Bloomberg, citing “two people familiar with the matter,” is now reporting that these TV-style commercials will cost as much as $2.5 million a day to reach the social network’s 1.15 billion monthly active users.
On Facebook’s second-quarter earnings call last week, COO Sheryl Sandberg noted that the site welcomes between 88 million and 100 million active users during prime-time TV hours in the U.S.
Bloomberg’s two anonymous sources say Facebook’s video ads, expected to debut in the fall, will initially be sold on a full-day basis and will offer age- and gender-based targeting. Users won’t see the same commercial more than three times in a day, and the ads will cost $1 million to $2.5 million a day.
It’s also worth noting that the 15-second length of these video ads will fit perfectly into Instagram’s new 15-second video format.
According to recent figures from comScore, Facebook is the No. 2 online video content property in the U.S. with 61.6 million unique viewers in June (Google is No. 1 with 158.3 million). During the month, Facebook’s video viewers watched 729.5 million videos, and each spent an average of 24.7 minutes watching video on the social network. Inside Facebook notes that Facebook users are becoming more engaged with videos in the News Feed.
Video ads on Facebook are certainly an appealing opportunity for brands willing and able to pony up that kind of money for exposure to a social audience, but it remains to be seen how the autoplay nature of the commercials will work
