Facebook to sell TV-style commercials

Facebook announced plans to sell 15-second advertising spots.

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.