You can make money off almost anything on the internet now, and Facebook videos are not exempt from this. Facebook provides a ground for money making on its platform for content creators, and if you follow certain rules and guidelines, you can easily make money from your content on Meta. In this article, we have decided to dig deeper into it, to guide you to get on the right path.
What are Facebook Videos
At the beginning of its journey, Facebook was a place with only one newsfeed and people posted pictures, their status, and links. Now the news feed has 4 sections:
- Home, now gives you the ability to post stories at the top of the news feed, like the way they do it on Instagram.
- Watch, where people watch videos from all types, both the most popular videos worldwide and the videos that you are interested in according to your search history.
- Groups, group chats where you can talk to a group of people.
- Gaming, a streaming platform like twitch that allows subscriptions and it's becoming more and more popular.
Introduction to Facebook Video Monetization
Generally, Facebook is an accumulation of everything you can find on the internet because of being the father of social media.
Remember when the USA government asked Mark Zuckerberg “How does Facebook earn money?” He answered: “Ads senator, we use advertisements for making money.”
He wasn't lying, Facebook does earn a ton of money from ads, and it is good to know how you can get involved with the business. The concept of Facebook ads is familiar only to some, and even fewer people know that they can monetize their videos. The lack of awareness about the monetization comes from this feature being fairly new. Not many know of it. And it was only available for a few users, as a test. The results of the "test" were successful, because Facebook actually did implement different monetization options that they have planned.
We all know that the demand for videos is increasing rapidly, and this is the best way to gain an audience. Facebook through the recent years has been trying to increase the users, since most people immigrated to platforms such as Instagram and YouTube and TikTok, etc. They saw it necessary to activate monetization. Facebook mostly targets big companies and businesses and brands, and clearly wants them to spend money on advertising. This will allow Facebook to hit two birds with one stone, making money from brands and businesses, gathering audience and new users.
Video monetization is used as a tool across all platforms to make content creators post frequently and stay on the platform for an extended time. Companies like Twitch even sign deals with their content creators to keep themselves exclusively on Twitch and not to join any other platform.
These are 3 ways that you can monetize your videos on Facebook:
- Brand collabs manager
- Fan Subscriptions
- In-stream Ads
In this article, we will go through each of these methods.
Brand Collabs Manager
Brand Collabs manager is Facebook's influencer marketing program, with this Facebook brings Brands and content creators, and influencers together. Brands can pay influencers so that they can pitch the products to their audience. There are brands and influencers involved in this business. This method is best for celebrities and people with big influence, exactly like doing a TV commercial from the comfort of your own home.
But remember that technically by having the right requirements anyone can sign up for Brand Collabs Manager, we'll talk about the conditions and guidelines in the next sections.
Usually, brands or advertisers will go on Facebook to look for a content creator like you to advertise their product and since Facebook approves of all the publishers that work on the platform, advertisers can make their money worthwhile.
To get approved, you just need to follow a couple of things and apply, so let’s talk about the process now.
How to Enable
To start your journey, you must have a Facebook page. A Facebook page is different from a Facebook personal account, Facebook page is dedicated to connecting customers with business, public figures, and influencers. It is very important to not mix up a Facebook page with a personal account on Facebook, since they are completely different and a personal account isn't what we're looking for.
You could be having any number of followers or friends on your Facebook personal account, and that is completely different from your Facebook page. The requirements for applying as a creator on Brand Collabs Manager include the following:
- Have at least 15 000 engagements on your page
- Have at least 3 000 hours of watch time in the past 2 months
- Have at least 30 000 views on 1-minute out of 3-minute videos in the past 2 months.
You will also need to be the admin of that specific Facebook page that you’re applying for. You also need to make sure you live in one of the following countries:
Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bangladesh, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, France, Germany, Guatemala, Honduras, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Portugal, Singapore, South, Africa, South Korea, Spain, Taiwan, Thailand, United Kingdom, United States, and Vietnam.
Then you can sign up for the program. If you have a Facebook page already, go to Meta for Creators and check if you’re yet eligible for becoming a creator.
Then, click on Set Up, and you will be redirected to the application page.
Select the associated page that you are an admin of, and click “Send.” Usually, you should get approved immediately, and you can start posting branded content using the Branded Content tool on your Creator Studio.
All you have to do is either start a post or a live stream or video and then select the Branded Content tag. Here’s how. For example, on the Creator Studio, start a new post.
Then, let’s say you fill up the content and everything. After all that, find this checkbox that says “Tag Sponsor”.
Then you can simply start tagging the brands that want to collaborate with you and advertise their products through you.
The same way works with videos and lives on mobile devices as well.
Example
Take a look at this video from Ninja. This is a promotional post that Ninja, a streamer, has posted as a collaboration with GFuel.
You can see that in some of his other posts and videos, he is also doing collaborations with them.
Subscriptions
The second way to earn money from your videos, if you don’t want to promote any products, is fan subscriptions. If you have an audience base that is super involved with your content and actually watches your videos and interacts with your page, you can definitely think about starting a subscription for your fans. For that, you will need to give your subscribers some extra content, be it exclusive videos, subscriber-only content, or anything else. Think of it as Patreon or YouTube subscriptions.
You shouldn’t stop creating your usual posts or videos, though. Those will keep having more people come to you, and if you don’t do them, and mainly focus on the subscriber-only content, then you will lose your audience. So you need to keep the balance between the two.
Subscriptions are great on Facebook because you will get to keep 100% of the transactions made through online gateways. This is while other platforms are getting up to 50% of the subscription income. So Facebook is a real deal here.
How to Enable
In order to set up the subscriptions, first your account needs to be eligible, and for that you will need to have more than 10 000 followers or a returning view count of 250 on your page in the past 2 months.
You will also need to have either at least 50 000 engagements in the past two months, or more than 180 000 minutes of your content watched by your audience in the past two months.
You can always go to the Monetization page, and check whether you can apply.
Once you are good to go, your page meets the criteria and your application is accepted, you can go to your Creator Studio, find the subscriptions section, and click “Start Setup.” After that, all you have to do is accept the terms, set up a payout method, set up the exclusive content or benefits that people will get by subscribing to you and setting the subscription price, which can be anything around $5.
When you send this information, you are likely to receive approval and then you get the choice to activate your subscriptions.
The benefits that your subscribers will get include getting a supporter badge, and you can also give them other benefits if you’d like.
Example
Take Ninja’s case for example. Ninja is a game streamer that mostly streams Fortnite, and on his Facebook page, you can subscribe to him while watching his videos or live streams.
His subscription looks like below. As you can see, you get a badge, exclusive content, and special stickers by becoming a subscriber, and it’s only $4.99 a month.
In-Stream Ads
When you hear the word “stream” you might think that this refers to the “live” videos that you would be posting. But here, the word in-stream just refers to the ads that play during a video is playing for the audience. So you might be browsing videos on Facebook, and then, just like on YouTube, you would have to watch some ads every once in a while. If you are monetized, those ads will pay you good money.
The key to being eligible for such a monetization method is having long-form video content that will make users sit by your video and wait till the end of the ad so they can watch your content.
There are a couple of types of Facebook in-stream ads: pre-roll, mid-roll, and image ads. Pre-roll ads play right before a video, mid-roll ads play in the middle of the video, and image ads are shown to the users underneath your video not actually incorporated into it.
Most of it seems similar to YouTube, as mentioned, but let’s see how you can actually become eligible for this.
How to Enable
In order for Facebook to pay you for the ads they play on your video content, you will have to have at least 10 000 followers on your Facebook page (keep in mind the difference between a Facebook page and a personal account once again).
You will also have to have 600 000 minutes of your videos viewed in the past 2 months, and have 5 active videos on your page. Plus, you need to be older than 18 and a resident of an eligible country.
To activate the monetization method, after checking that you are eligible, is enabling the in-stream ads on your Creator Studio. For the way Facebook places the ads on your videos, you can either choose automatic or manual. And that’s it. Wait for the cash to flow in.
Example
You can usually see in-stream ads play in the beginning or in the middle of videos in the format below. Users can usually skip the ad after a few seconds. They will also get a notification that an ad will start soon.
How to Have Eligible Video Content for Monetization on Facebook
Even though there are some great ways to monetize a Facebook video, you need to keep into consideration that not all your video content is eligible, and you actually need to follow some standards to make sure your content won’t be violating Facebook’s rules.
First and foremost, pay lots of attention to these four principles for your video content:
- Be authentic
- Be safe for work
- Respect people’s privacy and freedom
- Do not harass or disrespect anybody
These rules can branch out to some other standards, such as avoiding posting violent content, content that feels like a deception, restricted products, unreliable companies, etc. Also, don’t post any kind of exploitation of human rights, hate speech, graphic content, and all that sort of thing.
In general, try to keep your posts wholesome, and make sure your videos are actually what you want to put out there in the world. If it’s not completely valid or trustworthy, better not to ruin your reputation, especially if you are an affiliate or a marketer.
After all of this, your content needs to be completely original. You can copy content from someone else and expect your videos to be monetized by Facebook. So as long as you do creative editing or commentary on the content, you should be good.
Conclusion
Monetizing your Facebook videos might take some time, but in the long run, it’s going to be worth it, since Facebook is trying to gather some attention among content creators. And currently, they are quite a profitable platform to publish content on. So don’t worry about the ifs and buts or maybes, and get into it right away.
