Meta Platforms Inc.’s
META -1.55%
Facebook will let content creators make money from videos with licensed music starting Monday, as the company ramps up its efforts to combat rival TikTok, the popular video-sharing app.
Creators on Facebook will receive 20% of the revenue share through in-stream ads on videos that are longer than 60 seconds and use a song from the platform’s licensed music catalog, according to a company blog post. Meta and songs’ rights holders will each get a separate share.
The music revenue sharing feature will roll out Monday to creators already approved for the platform’s monetization tools. Facebook’s short-video product Reels won’t be eligible for monetization at this time, the company said.
“With video making up half of the time spent on Facebook, music revenue sharing helps creators access more popular music, deepening relationships with their fans—and the music industry,” the company said in the blog post.
Meta is pouring resources into the creator economy in an effort to attract individuals who can drive traffic to its platform, a broader shift toward the metaverse and short-form videos to better compete with TikTok. This month, the company said it was reallocating resources from its Facebook News tab and newsletter platform Bulletin so those teams could build “a more robust creator economy.”
TikTok’s popularity has left Meta trying to play catch-up with younger users. TikTok, owned by ByteDance Ltd., was the most downloaded app of 2021 and has overtaken Meta’s Instagram in popularity among young users.
In February, Chief Executive Officer
Mark Zuckerberg
pointed to Reels as the company’s fastest-growing format for content. The short-video product first rolled out on Instagram in August 2020, with the company initially offering popular TikTok creators monetary incentives to use the service when it launched.
Meta introduced a Facebook version of Reels last September and extended access to all global users on the platform in February.
Last week, Meta said it would offer a tab on Facebook that organizes content in chronological order, called Feeds, which would restore a more traditional “family-and-friends” feed for users. Instagram launched a similar tool in March.
The main feed on Facebook will continue to be curated based on an algorithm—and the company has previously said that it would more actively rely on what is recommended for a user by artificial intelligence and less on what accounts they might follow. That makes Facebook’s main feed more like TikTok’s For You feed, where users don’t see content based on who they follow but instead from what TikTok’s algorithm determines they are interested in.
Write to Sarah Donaldson at sarah.donaldson@wsj.com
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