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Cape Town - South Africans eager to start earning cash from Facebook should hold their horses, the company said.
Facebook is trialling a programme to pay video content creators for popular clips uploaded to the platform as the social network eyes the massive YouTube revenue machine.
The social network is in a race for eyeballs with Google-owned YouTube. Both platforms have around 1.4 billion active users according to Ampere and video content is seen as a key differentiator.
"The initial test is on iOS in the US and may eventually expand to other countries depending on results," Facebook told Fin24 of the programme that will pay content creators for suggested videos.
Facebook will offer videos that will play as users scroll and advertisers will pay once the clip has played for a minimum of 10 seconds.
Test programme
"Within suggested videos we will start running ads interspersed with the videos. These will be feed-style video ads, similar to what runs in News Feed today. We will start to share revenue with a group of media companies and video creators, based on revenue generated by these ads," said the social network.
YouTube's revenue model has made many people millionaires with channels such as DisneyCollector estimated to have earned $4.8m in 2014, followed by gamer PewDiePie ($3.9m) and baby entertainment channel Littlebabybum ($3.4m).
Given that the Facebook programme is a test though, South Africans will not be able to generate cash from social media videos yet as the company will no doubt tailor its platform to match YouTube's features.
Online video is set to boom. (Duncan Alfreds, Fin24)
Despite that, video is set to define Facebook and the company redesigned its News Feed to accommodate the rising demand for video.
"With the explosive growth of video on Facebook, it is exciting to see News Feed become the centre of discovery for this work," said Mark D'Arcy, chief creative offer of Facebook's Creative Shop said of the demand for video which grew 3.6 times in the last year.
The spike in video on social media reflects a growing demand for internet video which is set for exponential growth.
According to the Cisco Visual Networking Index 2015, South Africans are expected to download 43 billion minutes of video content by 2019, making video responsible for 78% of all IP traffic.
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