On the heels of healthy quarterly earnings, Facebook is rolling out
Anthology -- a new effort to partner publishers with brands in search of social-friendly video advertising.
Vice Media, The Onion, Funny Or Die, and other publishers have signed on to
work with Facebook’s Creative Shop to develop the ads.
Along with coming up with creative ideas to reach Facebook users, the social giant is promising to give brands all the audience
insights they can handle. “As Facebook Marketing Partners, Anthology publishers are trained on how to get the most out of Facebook to drive business results,” a company spokeswoman
said on Thursday.
Specifically, the Anthology program will offer audience planning, insights, distribution plans and measurement.
In the span of a year, Facebook has experienced a
staggering rise in video streaming. From virtually nothing, the company saw more than 4 billion daily video views, during the first quarter, while more than 80,000 videos have now been embedded on
third party Web sites.
Monetizing this video explosion will be key to Facebook’s future, analysts say.
“It will be important in coming quarters for the company to start to
show how much momentum [Facebook is] gaining in video advertising,” Debra Aho Williamson, principal analyst at eMarketer, said on Wednesday.
Facebook executives stressed the value of
video during the company’s first quarter earning call, on Wednesday.
For the quarter, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, said performance was strong across all marketer segments.
This was, in large part, because Facebook is a “great platform to do creative storytelling on mobile,” along with the continued growth of video, she said.
Yet, Sandberg said
Facebook still only takes a tiny share of brand dollars. Not even its biggest clients spend more than 5% of their budgets on the social giant. As such, there’s plenty of room for growth,
Sandberg said.
Facebook has every reason to be optimistic about its ongoing video investments. Growth in clickthroughs for video ads has outpaced clicks for other types of page posts on the
social giant, according to Kinetic Social.
Videos uploaded directly to Facebook now outnumber YouTube videos posted to the site, according to recent data from social analytics firm
Socialbakers. Also, as of November, Facebook Pages posting Facebook videos now outnumber Facebook pages posting YouTube videos.
Additional Anthology publishing partners include Electus
Digital, Oh My Disney, Tastemade and Vox Media.