Facebook now tests ads that play after videos

Nowadays the pre-roll ad model is widely used with video content. Just think how many times you’ve had to sit through an ad before a YouTube clip started playing for you (unless, of course, you’ve subscribed to YouTube Music Key, which makes the ads go away). Facebook, however, has another idea that it’s started testing.

These are ads that play after you’ve watched a video, and not before. At first blush, this might seem like a very counterintuitive idea, since many claim that pre-roll ads work exactly because you have no choice but to sit through them until the video you want to see starts.

In the case of these post-roll ads (if we can call them that), you’ve already seen the content you wanted to see, so you can just close the ad and move on. That makes such ads, in theory, a lot less prone for views. But Facebook wants to know if they might actually work, despite the ‘common sense’ that they wouldn’t.

So the social network has begun a very limited trial, in which it partnered with the NFL and Verizon. On some videos posted to the official NFL Facebook page, an ad for Verizon can be seen after the content has finished playing. There’s also a “Presented by Verizon” badge on the lower-right corner while the actual NFL video is playing, as you can see from the screengrab above.

The experiment seems to only work if you’re viewing the NFL videos from the United States, which makes sense since Verizon wouldn’t want to appeal to people who are located elsewhere. Facebook says this is a “very small” test, and it will be evaluating “how people, publishers, and marketers respond to this kind of co-branded video content”. In other words, if people end up actually watching these post-roll ads, we may get more of them across Facebook at some point in the future.

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