In an effort to compete with rival Tik Tok, Facebook users can now earn 20% of the revenue from ads on videos longer than 60 seconds.
As the company steps up its efforts to compete with rival TikTok, the well-known video-sharing app, Facebook will start allowing content creators to monetize videos with licensed music on Monday.
In-stream ads on Facebook videos longer than 60 seconds that feature a song from the service’s licensed music library will give creators 20% of the revenue, per a blog post from the company. Owners of the meta and song rights will each receive their own portion.
To creators who have already been given the platform’s approval for its monetization tools, the music revenue sharing feature will go live on Monday. According to the company, Reels, Facebook’s short-video product, is not currently eligible for monetization.
The company wrote in a blog post that “with video accounting for half of the time spent on Facebook, music revenue sharing helps creators access more popular music, deepening relationships with their fans—and the music industry.”
In order to better compete with TikTok, Meta is investing heavily in the creator economy, a wider shift toward the metaverse, and short-form videos in order to draw users who can drive traffic to its platform. In order to help those teams create “a more robust creator economy,” the company said this month that it was reallocating resources from its Facebook News tab and newsletter platform Bulletin.
Due to TikTok’s success, Meta is attempting to catch up with younger users. ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok, which has surpassed Meta’s Instagram in popularity among young users, was the most downloaded app of 2021.
Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s chief executive officer, identified Reels as its fastest-growing content format in February. When the short-video service launched on Instagram in August 2020, the company initially offered well-known TikTok creators financial incentives to use the platform.
Reels was first made available on Facebook by Meta in September of last year, and in February, access was made available to all users worldwide.
Last week, Meta announced that it would introduce a Feeds tab on Facebook, which would allow users to access a more conventional “family-and-friends” feed once again. In March, Instagram unveiled a comparable tool.
The main feed on Facebook will continue to be curated using an algorithm, and the company has previously stated that it will rely more actively on what artificial intelligence recommends for a user and less on which accounts they follow. This makes Facebook’s main feed more similar to TikTok’s For You feed, where users see content based on what TikTok’s algorithm determines they are interested in rather than who they follow.
