Facebook wants to boost its advertising lineup by unveiling new ad offerings that will become available not only on its own platform but also for third-party mobile ad network.
Facebook understands the lucrative nature of video ads as compared to traditional ads that are static or appear in a banner format. For this reason, the company has been pushing to sell these ads within its own platform. However, it also sees the limit to just how many of these ads can pop up in the News Feed. In order to address the situation, Facebook decides to sell video ads through its Audience Network, which gives it a much bigger platform and an opportunity to earn more revenue.
Launched in April last year, the Audience Network is Facebook's bid to compete with rival services such as Twitter's MoPub and Google's AdMob. The company is now launching new ad offerings including native video which is the biggest newcomer to the lineup.
"Over the past six months we have seen increased publisher adoption of native ads with 5x more apps now using native ads than the start of 2015," says Erika Washburn, software engineer at Facebook, in a blog post. "In fact, native ads represent over 80 percent of impressions in the Audience Network. Starting today, by upgrading to the latest SDK for iOS and Android and utilizing the new MediaView, publishers can now bring the autoplay video ads experience from Facebook directly to their apps."
Since the beginning of 2015, Facebook says that the number of apps which bought its native ads have increased by around five times. The company's mobile ads business is also growing fast that around three quarters of its ads revenue, which has reached $3.8 billion, was earned through mobile platforms during the last quarter, an increase from last year's record of 62 percent.
The new ad offerings come in a number of formats such as click-to-play video, carousel ads and Dynamic Product Ads. According to Facebook, these are high-performing formats which publishers who are already using the full screen interstitials of its Audience Network are eligible to deliver.
Click-to-play formats are perfect for game installations while carousel ads allow advertisers to display several images in a single ad. Dynamic Product Ads will help advertisers to create ads that are timely and relevant according to the products that the user has viewed through their app or website.
