We’ve heard it before that Facebook is paying celebrities to use Facebook Live. We’ve also heard that it’s signing up publishers and paying them to create Facebook Live content. The latter has now been confirmed however, and Facebook is not only signing up media companies, publishers and celebs, but it’s also paying them big bucks to create content on Facebook Live.
According to a recent article by Steven Perlberg and Deepa Seetharaman for the Wall Street Journal, Facebook has some 140 agreements with companies and individuals already. These agreements are costing the social network over $50 million. The New York Times and Buzzfeed alone have contracts for over $3 million each, over 12 months, and CNN has a $2.5 million 12-month contract. These are just the three highest-paid content partners – others include Tastemade, Mashable, Huffington Post and Vox Media. Celebrities such as Deepak Chopra or Gordon Ramsey have also signed up.
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Vice president of global operations and media partnerships at Facebook, Justin Osofsky, confirmed that the company had chosen partners based on their history with the medium and of course on whether they can “easily produce and test a variety of live programming.” He also explained that Facebook wanted
[quote]to invite a broad set of partners so we could get feedback from a variety of different organizations about what works and what doesn’t.[/quote]
Facebook is obviously banking heavily on Live, and is willing to put its money where its mouth is, so to speak. Just how much further the company is is willing to go in order to keep Live afloat if it runs into trouble, is a question we should of course ask ourselves. But in the grand scheme of things, the probability that Live will be a failure, is very very small.
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