Facebook Watch, the video content platform by Facebook, is now available globally. “Today we’re making Facebook Watch available everywhere — giving people around the world a new way to discover great videos and interact with friends, creators and other fans,” Fidji Simo, Head of Video, Facebook said in a blog post.
Watch was launched in the US a year ago to give people a place on Facebook “to find shows and video creators they love and to start conversations with friends, other fans, and even creators”.
Over the past year, Facebook has made the experience more social by adding features like making it easier to see which videos a user’s friends have liked or shared, creating shows that have audience participation at their core, and opening Watch to videos from Pages.
“These updates have helped people discover and engage more deeply with videos they love — from Red Table Talk with Jada Pinkett Smith to beauty mogul Huda Kattan’s behind-the-scenes show Huda Boss to live Major League Baseball games. Every month, more than 50 million people in the US come to watch videos for at least a minute in Watch — and total time spent watching videos in Watch has increased by 14X since the start of 2018,” Simo added.
Watch also opens new opportunities for creators and publishers globally. “We’re expanding our Ad Breaks program so more partners can make money from their videos, and we’re offering new insights, tools and best practices for Pages in Creator Studio,” Simo explained.
Brand Buzz
Fund Raise
Japanese messaging app Line is raising around $1.33 billion via convertible bonds. The amount will be used to fund Line’s expansion of its financial services arm Line Pay. Line Pay was launched in 2014 and allows users to make payments through its app by registering their credit cards. Line Pay has 164 million monthly active users in Asia. However, the app has faced fierce competition from the likes of Facebook’s WhatsApp and the WeChat app from China. The app celebrated its seventh birthday in June 2018, and launched 120 free Line Animated stickers on the occasion.
Dig The Data
Customer First
A study by MediaMath and Econsultancy has found that 91 per cent of marketers are aware of the importance of putting customer first in all their marketing efforts but 51 per cent of them do not do so. Lewis Rothkopf, MediaMath’s GM of Media and Growth Channels says this is because marketers in many cases still struggle to define what “omnichannel” means, and it is also sometimes challenging to determine the right mix of channels. Another interesting finding thrown up by the study was that seven in 10 organisations that do not take an omnichannel approach to its advertising lack the ability to accurately attribute its online advertising spend to offline channels.