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Facebook has made more progress along its Snapchat-based product roadmap – this time by launching a tool for users to overlay custom camera frames (or geofilters in Snapchat’s parlance) onto their photos, TechCrunch reports.
This tool can be found on Facebook’s new Camera Effects platform, which bears a striking, but unsurprising, resemblance to Snapchat's On-Demand Geofilters site. Camera Effects is now available in Colombia, Mexico, Taiwan, the UK and Ireland.
This is Facebook’s latest step in its quest to make the camera a more central part of its platform. In its most recent earnings report, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook was focused on enhancing the photo and video experience on both the consumption and the production side. Shortly before this, Facebook began testing a new camera that can be accessed from the News Feed with a single swipe, and that features animated selfie masks, overlaid graphics and geofilters.
Camera Effects, and the new camera, improves the production side of Facebook’s photo experience, as it gives users greater creative freedom to capture and edit their shots. These developments play into Facebook’s strategy in a couple ways:
- Unlocking new revenue opportunities. Camera Effects opens new avenues for Facebook to collect revenue by charging users for submitting custom photo frames, or by opening it up to brands as a new advertising format. Using frames to expand ad inventory could prove fruitful in light of Facebook’s admission that it’s about to hit a plateau on its ad load (the number of ads Facebook can serve to users).
- Threatening Snapchat’s uniqueness. Every page adopted by Facebook from Snapchat’s playbook de-emphasizes the differentiation of the ephemeral messaging platform. This has negative impacts for Snapchat on both the user and brand perspective. Users become may become less inclined to spend time in the app, while brands could opt to take their marketing budgets to Facebook, which already has a more sophisticated ad tech stack than Snapchat.
Dollars are increasingly flowing from traditional ads to digital, as strong growth in mobile, video, and social spending continue to change the face of the US media market.
Over the next five years, marketers will especially embrace mobile. Mobile will drive up spending on video, search, display, and social, and propel the migration of ad dollars away from traditional media, including newspapers and magazines.
BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, has compiled a detailed report that forecasts spending trends for the major digital ad formats — including search, display, and video — and mobile vs. desktop. It also examines trajectories for social ad spending and programmatic ad buying, which cut across digital formats. Finally, the report looks at how spending on traditional media formats will grow or contract over the next five years, as digital, and particularly mobile, rises.
Here are some of the key takeaways from the report:
- Mobile will be the fastest-growing advertising channel and buoy spending on each of the digital formats. US mobile ad revenue will rise by a 26.5% CAGR through of 2020.
- Digital video ad spending is rising faster than search and display. US digital video ad revenue will rise by a CAGR of 21.9% through 2020.
- Mobile search will overtake desktop search ad revenue by 2019. Mobile search ad spend will rise by a 25.2% CAGR, while desktop search ad revenue will decline during the same period.
- Mobile display ads, including banners, rich media, and sponsorships, will overtake desktop display-related spending even earlier, in 2017.
- Social media ads, which cut across display and video, are seeing fast adoption. US social media ad revenue, which includes video and display ads, will grow by a CAGR of 14.9% through 2020.
- The rapid embrace of programmatic ad-buying tools is fueling a dramatic uptick in the share of digital ad spending coming through programmatic channels. Programmatic transactions will be a majority of total US digital ad spend this year.
- Unlike digital, traditional ad revenue will remain flat overall through 2020. Total traditional ad revenue will rise by a CAGR of just 0.4% between 2015 and 2020.
In full, the report:
- Forecasts ad revenue for emerging digital ad channels and formats like mobile, video, social and programmatic over the next five years
- Explores why ad revenue is flowing from desktop to mobile
- Examines the stagnation of traditional advertising channels like TV, magazines, and newspapers
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