Facebook Watch

For short-form videos, Facebook originally had a budget of roughly $10,000-$40,000 per episode,[8] though renewal contracts have placed the budget in the $50,000-$70,000 range.[9] Long-form TV-length series have budgets between $250,000 to over $1 million.[9] The Wall Street Journal reported in September 2017 that the company was willing to spend up to $1 billion on original video content through 2018.[10][11]

Facebook keeps 45% of ad-break revenue for content shown on Facebook Watch, while its content-producing partners receive 55% of ad revenue.[2] In January 2017, the company announced that it would be adding "mid-roll" advertising to its videos, in which ads will appear in videos after users have watched at least 20 seconds.[12] In December 2017, Ad Age reported that Facebook was lifting a long-time ban on "pre-roll" ads, an advertising format that shows promotional content before users start the actual video. Facebook had resisted using pre-roll ads because the format has a "reputation for annoying viewers" who want to get to the desired content, though the report stated that the company would nevertheless try the format.

Steve Ellis, CEO of WhoSay, a social influencer marketing company, told Ad Age that "YouTube already established that people will sit through and tolerate pre-roll" and that "It's proven that they haven't sent consumers fleeing, so it makes sense that Facebook would pursue a similar strategy as it builds out its original content experience".[13] Two weeks after Ad Age's report, Facebook updated its blog to note that the pre-roll advertising format would begin testing in 2018, and that there were going to be changes to mid-roll ads; specifically, they cannot appear until a minute into a video, and are only available for videos that run for at least three minutes, as opposed to the original rule of appearing after 20 seconds on videos potentially as short as 90 seconds.[14][15]