Facebook is bringing its autoplay video ads to third-party mobile apps that sell ad space through Facebook’s mobile ad network Audience Network, the company announced on Tuesday. Developers don’t have to get a sales team, and Facebook gets a percentage of the profits. Adding auto-play videos to the arsenal of native ads available through the ad network was the logical next step, and also underscores how important video advertising has become for Facebook.
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“Since launching last year, the Audience Network has provided publishers and developers with engaging, high performing ad units backed by Facebook’s 2M advertisers”, a Facebook spokesperson told us in an email.
Facebook had already been selling display ads this way. So if a shopper adds a pair of designer shoes to her cart in a merchant’s mobile app, the retailer can choose to show her ads featuring products from its designer shoe category or items from its designer handbag category-or both.
The new formats include native autoplay video ads, as well as interstitials like carousel ads that can showcase up to five images, dynamic product ads for retargeting consumers and click-to-play video. It could enhance its advertisements, and develop a business model in such a way, that it is no longer necessary to show ads on the news feed. Advertisers aren’t able to buy ads specifically to run on the mobile ad network; instead it’s like an overflow room, where Facebook takes the ads that run on the social network and syndicates them to others’ apps based on the advertiser’s defined targeting parameters.
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By using collected data to focus on people using a wide range of apps, the company could make its own platform cleaner, without compromising its ad revenues.
