Facebook announced that it is expanding LiveRail, which it acquired in July of last year, in a push to make video the latest native advertising format on third-party apps through Facebook.
LiveRail, an advertising technology platform for videos of publishers, will soon be supporting display advertisements in mobile apps simultaneously with video.
The direction for LiveRail was briefly mentioned by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg during the keynote speech for the company's annual F8 Developer Conference. The plan was then detailed by Mark Edwards, an engineer for LiveRail, through a blog post on Facebook's Developers page.
"LiveRail will power native ad formats as well as standard display placements like interstitials and banners. The Audience Network, with its high performing native ad format and access to 2 million Facebook advertisers, is tightly integrated into this platform," wrote Edwards in the post.
The Facebook Audience Network (FAN) is an in-app advertising network that expands the reach of advertisers to other third-party mobile apps outside Facebook. The network basically functions similarly to Google AdSense, which populates the websites of people with relevant advertisements, but FAN is geared toward app publishers.
LiveRail holds live auctions for extra space for advertisements, but it has previously only dealt with video advertisements. The expansion of LiveRail will now allow publishers to mix mobile display advertisements along with video advertisements.
By utilizing the FAN, publishers will also be able to target the right audience for their advertisements accurately.
When LiveRail was acquired by Facebook, the company focused on facilitating sales for the video advertisements of online publishers through real-time auctions. However, for the months after Facebook's acquisition, executives of the company asked publishers if they would be interested in having LiveRail also handle their non-video advertisements.
With the expansion of LiveRail, Facebook now finds itself in a position as a competitor against the biggest online advertisers in the world, which include Google, Apple, Amazon, Yahoo and Twitter, and is fighting these other companies to win over app developers.
The competition among the tech giants could prove healthy for the digital advertisement industry, said Gartner VP Andrew Frank, adding that the companies all have a lot of space to grow into due to the rapidly expanding market.
However, according to Frank, with the recent moves of Facebook into digital advertising, the company is moving away from its focus on social networks and becoming more like an advertisement-based media company, similar to Google.
