Facebook introduced Live Video on the bottom half of last year and it signaled a big player dipping its toes to the livestreaming gold rush. The company has decided to roll it in stages starting with celebrities, then Pages and it is yet to roll it out to each of its 1.65 billion active users. It has led to people engaging more on the platform and Facebook went ahead to give it more priority over other content on an update on the News Feed.
The next challenge when it comes to Live Video is content and Facebook has noticed that live broadcasts from celebrities and popular publishers and now the company wants to capitalize on that.
According to a report by the Wall Street Journal, Facebook signed deals with nearly 140 partners, which included celebrities and digital publishers. This deal apparently is more than $50 million that will be dished out to media establishments like BuzzFeed, New York times, vox Media, Tastemade and celebrities like Gordon Ramsay and Kevin Hart. BuzzFeed for example will apparently be paid $3.05 million in this deal and New York Times will be paid slightly less ($3.05 million) for a 12 month deal (between March this year and March next year.)
You can understand Facebook’s quest to engage these partners to continuously generate live broadcasts. BuzzFeed employees made a huge successful live video broadcast back in April that involved bursting out a watermelon with balloons and these kind of engagement is what Facebook wants. Adding to the fact that over two thirds of the total viewing count of a live broadcast is watched when it is over and stored in a timeline, this deal will lead to Facebook’s total view count to go higher than the current 8 billion a month.
