No more mid-roll ads

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Just like what I said in the title, ‘NO MORE MID-ROLL ADS’

In case some of you may have no idea about ‘mid-roll ads’, it is a new ad feature of Facebook. How does it work? Basically, in all videos that are at least 90 seconds long on Facebook, publishers will be able to insert the ads after people have watched a video for at least 20 seconds, according to Business Insider. In other words, when you are watching any videos that are 90 seconds long, an ad will pop up after 20 seconds, and you will need to finish watching the ad in order to keep watching your video, that’s why it is called ‘mid-roll’, rolling in the middle of your video! YouTube’s one is called pre-roll video ads.

image from Quickmeme

I’ve just experienced this new ad feature few days ago, and I’m sure there are people who dislike this feature as much as me. There has been a clear notion for marketers and publishers that most people do not like to be interrupt by ads when they are using social media. And there may be a chance that the engagement would drop after ads are inserted into videos on Facebook, but media analyst Rebecca Lieb said that ‘common sense would dictate that if a viewer has invested 20 seconds in a video, they’ll hang in there for the end’.

What Rebecca Lieb said is exactly what I did, because I was already half way through the video, and I just wanted to watch the end of it even though the ad just pop up.

image from meme generator

Facebook’s mid-roll ad feature indeed is a new way of increasing their revenue, by selling advertising space where other organizations can effectively rent that space to get their message out. For companies and marketers, advertisement in video form is become more and more important, as marketers have noticed the shift of people looking more and engageing more into videos rather than reading wordy posts.

It is important for marketers to understand why this shift happen, just so companies may have to change their marketing strategies when approaching their customers. I think the fairly obvious reason that people choose to watch a video rather than reading something with a thousand words would be because video is simply more interesting. According to Visual Narrative, ‘video gives you the change to go deeper’, in that case, a company is able to explain and expand itself in a video, which will lead to the success of grabing customers’ attention.

Indeed, not only Facebook and YouTube have noticed the shift from words to videos, but many other social media such as Instagram, Snapchat have been adopting to the idea of video feed, which allows people communicating and sharing with one another in video form rather than the very traditional posts and comments.

Facebook will now sell the ads and the revenue will be split, with publishers receiving a 55%, which is the same revenue split as YouTube, according to Recorde. I think it is interesting to think about it as a publisher, if both YouTube and Facebook are offering the same payout, would you choose to advertise on YouTube, or Facebook?