Facebook, Twitter Trying To Entice YouTube Stars

Facebook, Twitter trying to entice popular YouTube stars.

Facebook and Twitter are trying to entice YouTube stars hesitant to post their content on the social networks by developing new ad models that would make it more financially appealing for them to post content, according to a report from Bloomberg.

The average YouTube star currently makes a lot more from ads or sponsored clips on their YouTube posts than they could ever hope to make off a similar post to Facebook or Twitter.

But Bloomberg says that Facebook and Twitter — as well as Instagram, which is owned by Facebook — are making “big, strategic moves into higher-quality video content” in an effort to take users away from YouTube and bring them to their social networks instead.

But in order to do that, the social networks are going to have to invest in ways to make it profitable for some of the most popular YouTube posters — YouTube “stars” oftentimes have several million followers, many of whom will relentlessly watch whatever video the star posts — to actually make money by posting content they could otherwise post to YouTube on their networks.

“Facebook and Twitter are realizing that, if they want to get the biggest, most engaged audiences, they need to have videos that draw the most viewers,” according to the Bloomberg report. “That means offering the creators a cut of their ad revenue.”

Twitter has already begun offering a “slice” of revenue for much of this content, thanks to its Amplify program, which Twitter claims would give YouTube stars the same 70 percent portion of ad revenue that it currently offers to larger media outlets on its network.

Facebook says that it will experiment with a “bunch of different formats” to give YouTube creators a cut of the ad revenue, but the company would not specify exactly what portion of the ad cut a creator might get or when it might be implemented.

Facebook told Bloomberg that those changes would be in the “coming months.”