Facebook has been paying celebrities and media publishers like BuzzFeed, the New York Times and Vox Media to use its live video product for the past year.
Now, those one-year agreements are coming up, and the company says it hopes to transition those publishers to a revenue sharing model instead of just paying them outright to make live videos.
“When we talked about it with people up front, we told them we were going to pay for the first year. That’s kind of [ending] around now,” Dan Rose, Facebook’s VP of partnerships, said at the Code Media conference at the Ritz-Carlton in Dana Point, Calif.
“We’re going to probably extend some of those for a while longer just to make sure people have a chance to transition, but the long-term model is rev-share,” he added.
Recode reported last month that publishers were preparing for this transition, and while Rose declined to talk about specific deals, more than half a dozen publishers Recode spoke with said they aren’t expecting to get a new deal.
Instead, Facebook is focused on getting longer, high-quality videos from these publishers to put inside its new video section of the app. Rose said that Facebook isn’t ready to target 30-minute-style TV shows just yet, but that Facebook is looking for more five- to 10-minute-long videos instead.
Facebook will incentivize publishers to create longer stuff the same way it did with live videos – by paying them. Facebook has a history of paying content creators in order to jumpstart new formats. It pays VR developers to build for Oculus, for example, and Rose says the company will do the same to get publishers creating longer videos for the video tab.
The ultimate plan is for those deals to be temporary, though.
“Our goal is to get it seeded and then move to a model that…