You’re going to start seeing more video in your Facebook feed.
In Wednesday’s quarterly earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that Facebook is making a push into video, but said it plans to do it with short-form content. This follows rumors that the social media giant is considering a push into television.
Zuckerberg didn’t rule this out, saying that Facebook may focus on “episodic” content in the long-term, but that, for now, the focus is on shorter original clips produced by brands and creators.
“We want people to see Facebook as a place for interesting and relevant video content from professional creators as well as their friends,” he said.
Professional content, however, will need to be paid for. That support will eventually come from ads. The growth of video has created more opportunity for in-video advertising, Zuckerberg said. Facebook will explore using ad revenue to pay creators for their video, but that will require a dedicated audience.
“I’ve said before that I see video as a megatrend, on the same order as mobile,” Zuckerberg said. “That’s why we’re going to keep putting video first across our family of apps and make it easier for people to capture and share video in new ways.”
Zuckerberg said he hopes the new video tab on mobile will draw more viewers and eventually become a place where people go when they want to watch video content. Early trends suggest this is happening, Zuckerberg said. Facebook CFO David Wehner said the company will also fund some “seed” content up front first to create an audience for ad sales later.
Another way the site hopes to target audiences for video in the future is artificial intelligence. Facebook is working on developing AI that can watch a video and determine if it should enter a user’s feed, Zuckerberg said. The same technology could also be used to remove “objectionable” content quicker.
“There’s no reason that we shouldn’t be able to match you up with any of the millions of pieces of content that you might be interested in,” Zuckerberg said.
