• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, December 14, 2017

As part of an update to Live Ad Breaks, Facebook will no longer support Profiles, and will only support Pages with more than 50,000 followers.

Among other explanations for the change, Facebook said below this threshold Profiles and Pages are more likely to share live videos that don't comply with its content guidelines for monetization.

“Live video publishers below this threshold also tend to have smaller audiences for their broadcasts, and therefore aren’t able to garner meaningful revenue from Ad Breaks,” Maria Angelidou-Smith and Abhishek Bapna, product management director and product manager at Facebook, note in a new blog post.

In an effort to improve distribution of videos from publishers and creators that people actually want to watch, the tech titan is also updating its News Feed rankings.

Per the update, Facebook now plans to show more videos in News Feed that people seek out or return to watch from the same publisher or creator.

“Engaging one-off videos that bring friends and communities together have always done well in News Feed and will continue to do so,” Angelidou-Smith and Abhishek Bapna said.

To make it easier for show creators to reach their existing community, Facebook will now let them distribute episodes directly to their followers. More broadly, while News Feed is expected to remain a popular place for video, Facebook is trying to encourage more video viewing on Watch.

Starting in January, Facebook says it will focus the expansion of Ad Breaks on shows. Ad Break eligibility will shift to videos and episodes that are at least three minutes long, with the earliest potential Ad Break at the one minute mark.

Previously, videos in the test were eligible for Ad Breaks if they were a minimum of 90 seconds, with the first Ad Break able to run at 20 seconds.

As previously announced, Facebook reminded the world this week that it plans to start testing pre-rolls ads on Watch.

“While pre-roll ads don’t work well in News Feed, we think they will work well in Watch because it’s a place where people visit and come back to with the intention to watch videos,” Angelidou-Smith and Abhishek Bapna said.

“We’ll start with six-second pre-roll with the goal of understanding what works best for different types of shows across a range of audiences,” they said.