Facebook Will Reportedly Pay Up To $250,000 Per Episode For Long-Form Content

Facebook has not been stingy about its spending as it looks to challenge power players like YouTube in the world of original video, and a new report offers an estimate for just how much the social giant is willing to spend on the shows it picks up. Reuters has cited anonymous sources who claim that the budget for Facebook’s long-form programming is $100,000 to $250,000 per show.

The plan, as far as Facebook has indicated, is to use a combination of short-form and long-form programming to “seed” the new video tab on which the company’s originals will be available. The new report indicates that the financials of those two formats will be distinct from one another, and not just in terms of the respective prices they will command. Short-form content will fetch $10,000 to $35,000 per show, and will not be wholly owned by Facebook. Instead, those videos will include ads, with publishing partners taking home 55% of the resulting revenue.

The companies Facebook will work with on these short-form projects will include a few of its regular collaborators, including BuzzFeed, Vox, ATTN,

and Group Nine Media. Meanwhile, details are still sparse about the long-form content executive Mina Lefevre is corralling, but the consensus is that Facebook will own the half-hour shows it picks up, with no revenue split.

There seems to be some discrepancy on what exactly that $250,000 is buying. The original Reuters report claimed Facebook “is set to pay up to $250,000 for the longer, scripted shows.” Variety later termed that as a per-episode budget. Tubefilter reached out to Facebook for comment, but a representative for the social platform declined to comment on this story.

Originally, Facebook’s big content library was rumored to be arriving in June, though that now does not seem like it will be the case. A recent Recode report claimed Facebook’s first wave of originals will now premiere toward the end of the summer.