Facebook has launched its Live Audio Rooms and everyone seems to have already forgotten what it is, even faster than Clubhouse ceased to be “the hot new thing”. No question of abdicating so far for Mark Zuckerberg.
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Riding the wave created by Clubhouse around audio content, Facebook launched the Live Audio Rooms. Problem, this kind of content visibly struggles to take on the social network. So, the company dangles tidy sums of money to creators so that more of them can offer it.
This is what reveals The Information, site according to which Facebook would be ready to pay influential personalities up to $ 50,000 to use this function of the platform. A financial effort that is part of the investment plan for content creators announced by Mark Zuckerberg in July 2021, when he said he wanted to pay them $ 1 billion by the end of 2022.
A generous compensation program
This strategy of buying buzz is nothing new and Facebook (now called Meta) has already implemented it in the past, on Instagram in particular to encourage the most popular accounts to offer Reels in order to fight against the emergence of TikTok and its small video clips. Some Instagrammers had received up to $ 35,000 from Facebook.
According to The Information who quotes people who have been able to consult the contracts directly, “Facebook offers to pay musicians and other creators between $ 10,000 and $ 50,000 per session on its live audio product, which has been around for five months, as well as guest pay of $ 10,000 or more”. Creators are asked to offer at least six live sessions of a minimum duration of 30 min each.
A very common process
As recalled our colleagues from The Verge, it would be tempting to laugh at the lack of success of these formats on Facebook, which has to bribe the creators to publish on them. But all social platforms do. Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok…: all these networks have compensation programs for content creators. The only difference is that Facebook has deeper pockets.
In this case, it will be interesting to see if many creators respond to this call for the publication of audio content. It will be even more important to observe whether this will attract users and whether these creators will continue to publish audio content once Facebook stops paying them.
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