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Bloomberg
Facebook Inc. is launching Watch, its video rival to YouTube, internationally and expanding the financial incentives that encourage people to share their content there.
Video makers in five countries will be eligible to take a percentage of the ad revenue that comes from their content around the world as long as their videos on Watch are popular enough and meet Facebook’s standards, the Menlo Park, California-based company said. The ad incentives will be expanded to other countries in the fall. Meanwhile, Facebook will increase its spending on content deals for the video site, to account for the international audience.
“The amount we’re investing in this obviously is going to scale with the size of the opportunity, and obviously we’re scaling to the entire globe,†Matthew Henick, Facebook’s head of content strategy and planning, said.
The global expansion presents a risk for Facebook. On the news feed, advertising appears separately from user content. Within the video service, ads can come in the middle of whatever someone is watching.
Preventing advertisements from running in front of inflammatory videos has been a challenge for YouTube, the world’s largest video site and the biggest competitor to Facebook Watch.