Skip to footer

Facebook to sell TV-style commercials

Facebook announced plans to sell 15-second advertising spots.

|
Paul Sakuma/ AP Photo/ File
A sign at Facebook headquarters near one of the company's offices in Menlo Park, Calif. Facebook announced plans to put TV-style advertising on its site.
  • By Tony Maglio Reuters

Facebook plans to sell 15-second, TV-style commercials that will appear in users' feeds for as much a $2.5 million, Bloomberg reported Tuesday.

The world's largest social-networking site, which has 1.15 billion members, plans to start offering 15-second video spots to advertisers later this year, according to Bloomberg sources, who the publication says asked not to be named because the plans aren't public.

A Facebook spokesperson told The Wrap that the site had no comment.

The social network currently allows advertisers to upload videos to their Facebook page and then broadcast them to a user's news feed. The new service would let marketers buy their way directly into a person's feed with a 15-second pitch, according to Bloomberg.

At 15 seconds, the ads also would be the same length as Facebook's Instagram videos -- a feature that was added to the company's photo-sharing service last month.

The commercials will initially be sold on a full-day basis and can only be targeted to users based on age and gender.

Facebook members won't see a commercial more than three times in a given day. The ads will range in price from $1 million to about $2.5 million a day, depending on how many people the advertiser wants to reach.

That is not a small pool to draw from.

"Every night, 88 million to 100 million people are actively using Facebook during prime-time TV hours in the United States alone," Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said last week on a conference call about second-quarter results.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Facebook to sell TV-style commercials
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/Latest-News-Wires/2013/0801/Facebook-to-sell-TV-style-commercials
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe