Facebook on Wednesday announced a revised version of its advertising guidelines, explicitly defining content that it deems fit for monetization and detailing the kind of videos whose creators won’t be able to make money from them. The goal of the company’s newly introduced guidelines is to promote a brand-safe environment where large advertisers will want to spend their money, in addition to identifying content creators whose videos aren’t a specific violation of the social media platform’s general terms of use but are still deemed to be unsuitable for monetization. Apart from complying with Facebook’s general policies and terms, content creators must have an established Facebook presence if they want to use the network to make money off of their offerings, the company said, specifying that personal accounts and pages hoping to use its monetization features must be at least a month old.
A number of monetization functionalities like Ad Breaks won’t be available to everyone and will instead require a specific volume of followers, Facebook said, adding that some existing features which don’t have such requirements may adopt them in the future. The company is also seeking to prevent monetization of sensationalist videos, clickbait, misinformation, and similar types of low-effort content, which is seen as a continuation of its previously introduced strategy for fighting fake news. Individuals and entities who repeatedly produce and share such work may permanently lose their ability to monetize any other content, Facebook said, without clarifying on the matter, with its wording implying that such sanctions will be decided on a case-by-case basis.
A revision of Facebook‘s advertising guidelines comes shortly before the company makes video ads available to a wider variety of its partners as part of a major video push. The Menlo Park, California-based social media giant has been pursuing a new video strategy for several years now and didn’t hide its ambitions to start directly competing with YouTube in the online video space. That ambition also led it to the new revision of its monetization guidelines which are currently similar to those of YouTube and are unlikely to be relaxed at any point in the future.