Facebook will share ad money to score more premium video

Facebook Inc. will begin sharing advertising revenue with companies that post videos on its social network, a step toward luring more premium content away from sites like Google Inc.'s YouTube.

Facebook will offer contributors 55 percent of the revenue from ads that appear alongside videos, the same split as YouTube. The spots will be part of a new feature that suggests clips to Facebook users who are already watching videos, the company said.

Video viewing has exploded on Facebook in the past year, as the company has interspersed clips among the photos, status updates and other posts in users' News Feeds. Facebook generates more than 4 billion video views a day, Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said in April, up fourfold in just a few months.

The company, owner of the world's largest social network, wants to persuade major media companies to post more of their videos on Facebook before anywhere else, a way to increase the ad revenue from clips.

"These premium content makers have told us that if they had a way to make money from Facebook then they would post a lot more," said Dan Rose, a Facebook vice president.

To contact the reporters on this story: Sarah Frier in San Francisco at sfrier1bloomberg.net; Lucas Shaw in Los Angeles at lshaw31bloomberg.net To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jillian Ward at jward56bloomberg.net Rob Golum