Facebook Live’s partnerships with digital publishers have so far yielded an exploded watermelon and a failed interview with the president, among other things. However, now new details are emerging about Facebook’s plans to pay not just celebrities and media outlets but also content creators from YouTube and Vine.
Spending big money to lure Internet stars
Facebook is paying internet stars like Ray William Johnson and Jon Paul Piques more than $100,000 to use its Facebook Live feature for a few months, according to The Wall Street Journal. Johnson made his name on YouTube, and Piques has snagged some “fame” on Vine. Both Internet stars are just a few of nearly two dozen Vine stars, YouTube creators and Internet personalities targeted by the social networking giant, according to the Journal.
Johnson is reportedly the highest paid “personality” and could make about $224,000 for less than six months of work. Facebook overall is said to be spending about $2.2 million to influence “internet personalities” to use its Live feature. The social networking giant is also reportedly paying independent artists as much as $24,000 per video. The tech giant is said to be paying Piques $119,000 to post at least five videos over the next two months on its live-streaming service.
It is already known that to produce a certain number of videos per month for its live-streaming service, the social networking giant is paying millions of dollars to media outlets like BuzzFeed and The New York Times. According to documents obtained by the Journal, BuzzFeed alone is getting $3 million.
A big change for Facebook
For the social media giant, this no doubt is a big change, indicating that the tech giant wants to compete hard and supersede rivals Vine and YouTube when it comes to “content creators.” However, it is only about 5% of the $50 million the tech giant is reportedly spending to lure people and companies into using Live.
During the online video convention VidCon in June, a question about Facebook Live and revenue sharing from advertising popped up. According to The WSJ, YouTube used to pay people to create channels, which is similar to what the tech giant is doing now.
Whether a Facebook partnership would prohibit participants from using other platforms or not is still not certain, but judging from Piques’ still-active Vine account, it does not seem to be a problem. Poaching Vine stars will be relatively easy for the social networking giant as Twitter is not doing much to help its Vine stars generate income.
