How Facebook is helping creators monetise content through brand partnerships

With video becoming one of the biggest drivers of engagement growth on Facebook, the social networking platform has announced new monetisation tools such as Brand Collabs Manager as well as introduced ad breaks to help Indian publishers and creators manage their presence, engage their fans, and build their business on the platform. 

Brand Collabs Manager is a new tool that helps brands find creators to collaborate with for branded content opportunities on Facebook. With Brand Collabs Manager, the creators can quickly create a portfolio so that brands can learn more about them and get in touch easily for brand partnerships. It will be available in India in 2019. 

Ad breaks are short ads before or during qualifying videos assist video creators to earn money. Now, creators in India can join ad breaks to get a share of the revenue from the video ads shown to the viewer. Ad breaks are now available for eligible partners in Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Malayalam and English. 

Publishers and creators can visit fb.me/joinadbreaks, Creator Studio or their Page Video Insights to join ad breaks. On these destinations, those that do not yet meet the eligibility criteria can view a graphical representation of their Facebook followers, video views, and Monetisation Eligibility Standard compliance to track each page’s progress towards qualifying. To provide greater transparency into Monetization Eligibility Standard compliance, publishers and creators can access a new visualisation in Creator Studio that indicates if policy violations are impacting their eligibility for or ongoing ability to monetise on Facebook. They can also see a list of some of these violations, and in some cases submit an appeal directly from the list. Once publishers and creators qualify for ad breaks, they can onboard and begin inserting placements for ads in their videos. Facebook is also introducing the ability for Pages to bulk upload large numbers of videos, so they can easily build up their Facebook video presence and earn money for their qualifying back catalogue. 

The cornerstone of achieving and maintaining ad break eligibility and earning meaningful revenue starts with creating the type of content that viewers find works best with ad breaks: longer videos that people seek out and want to come back to. 

These announcements were made by Facebook at its first ‘Creator Day’ in India, held in Mumbai last week, which was attended by video creators from all over the country. 

Present at the daylong event were Paresh Rajwat, Head of Product for Video, Facebook, and Saket Jha Saurabh, Head - Entertainment Partnerships, Facebook India. 

Speaking on the content creator community, who form the TG for these new tools, Saket Jha Saurabh informed that the community is 1 billion+ strong today. Facebook is reaching out content creators in India to create and distribute original content to inform, educate, entertain and build community on the social media platform. “The creator community is the core to our mission, they are the newest and most powerful story tellers on social media, reflect and grow them on our platforms,” he added. 

Paresh Rajwat added here, “Our mission is to enable shared experiences and a sense of belonging through video. There are three factors to it – Co-watching, Interactivity and Community. Eligible publishers and creators in India can now join ad breaks and monetise their longer-form videos on Facebook that build loyal fan followings. We had also launched Facebook Watch in India two weeks ago.” 

Further elaborating on how the ad break tool works for content creators, Rajwat informed that the criteria is that the creator needs to upload his/her video which has to be of at least 3-minute duration. “The cornerstone of achieving and maintaining ad break eligibility and earning meaningful revenue starts with creating the type of content that viewers have told us works best with ad breaks – longer videos that people seek out and want to come back to,” he added. 

A creator can manage the content and build loyalty with his subscribers by:

• Managing their presence – Create a studio, rights manager, sound collection, creator App, video page and template for tabs
• Building a business – Ad breaks which open to all in India today for all eligible partners
• Growing their community – Use Facebook Watch to videos with friends by creating FB stories, FB live

To start monetising one’s content the creator needs to have at least 10,000 likes/ subscribers. In order to ensure that the videos are brand safe and legit, Facebook has filters in place to check this. Rajwat also emphasised that monetisation is only for original content and not for those who do mash-ups. For this, the ads are selected by Facebook and not by the creators. The ads also go through a rigorous checking process. 

The revenue sharing model ensures 55 per cent returns to the creator, while Facebook gets 45 per cent. Facebook has also invested a lot on branded content. “As a platform, we have created products while keeping in mind the integrity of the users. We have created Brand Collabs Manager, which helps small creators who do good work and have an audience but don’t have access to a GroupM or the big media agencies collaborate with brands for branded content opportunities on Facebook. With Brand Collabs Manager, the creators can quickly create a portfolio so that brands can learn more about them and get in touch easily for brand partnerships,” Rajwat further said. 

Growing regional content on the Facebook platform is also on the agenda.