Facebook Willing To Pay Celebrities To Use Its Live Streaming

Close on the heels of the recent expansion of its live video streaming feature – Facebook Live – beyond iOS to the Android platform last week, social network Facebook now plans to give videos a premium placement in the News Feed of the users.

Unlike Periscope, where your videos are deleted after 24 hours, Facebook’s Live service allows you to permanently save your streams. Facebook has also recently said that Facebook Live will soon be made available for Android users. That pitch is helped by the fact that Facebook’s audience spends more time watching a video while it’s live than after the stream has ended. “People spend more than 3x more time watching a Facebook Live video on average compared to a video that’s no longer live“, said Vibhi Kant, Product Manager and Jie Xu, Software Engineer on the Facebook blog post from 1 March.

The Facebook Live service initially opened up to celebrities last summer and is now in CEO Mark Zuckerberg‘s sights as a major project. This reveals that Facebook is now treating live videos as a new type of content, and not bundled up along with the traditional videos being uploaded to the social network. “We’ll be working closely with these partners to learn from them how we can build the best Facebook Live experience and explore with them potential monetization models”. Previously, when it comes to videos, what FB usually does is to take into account how many people watched the video and how long they actually watched it. They also later on figured out that if a person turns on the sound or makes it to full screen, then it means they must be really interested. Now, videos that are currently streaming on Live will be listed higher in your feed than older saved streams.

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According to Re/Code Facebook’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg has been in Hollywood talking to talent agencies about the move. They will be able to discern the number of their friends that are tuning in to watch their stream and even view live comments posted.