Search and display ads are nice, but Facebook hopes it can add a new revenue stream with video advertising. "Facebook reportedly plans to charge $1 million to
$2.5 million a day for video campaigns, depending on the size of the
audience a marketer is trying to reach. But that price range could
reduce advertiser interest." Video ads might start running the moment you land on Facebook, although the plans seems to be to mute the audio until clicked on. How Facebook users will react to autoplay ads remains to be seen; most likely, they have already seen this feature on other websites. Still, it may prove distracting.
Regardless of this new video ad focus, Facebook's real challenge may be that the younger demo is moving away from Facebook to Instagram and that will only skew older the current audience to Facebook. Will advertisers still want to buy this older demo or move budgets to Instagram and other websites? For now, Facebook is right to add video ads although they may end up turning off the autoplay feature to gain more credibility of the ad views. It is an important next step and one that might just find its way to Instagram, too.
