Facebook Hosts ‘Global Creator Day’ In Mumbai, Launches Monetization Tools In India

Facebook hosted its first-ever Creator Day in Los Angeles over the summer to coincide with VidCon, during which the social giant invited 120 top video makers to convene with company executives, attend workshops, and receive introductions to new products — including monetization tools.

Now, Facebook is taking that initiative global. After hosting its first Creator Day in Sao Paulo last month, the company kicked off a second Global Creator Day event in Mumbai today. Facebook says that the push aims to demonstrate its commitment to creators the world over, and help influencers harness tools to bolster their followers and business prospects.

Product exec Paresh Rajwat headlined the daylong Mumbai event, sharing Facebook Video updates for the Indian market. Perhaps most notably, the company is launching ‘Ad Breaks’ in India today, meaning that local creators can finally monetize their content with ad revenues. Ad breaks — which can be inserted by creators into videos that are at least three minutes long — are now available for influencers whose content is in Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Malayalam, and English, reports the Hindustan Times

At the event today, Facebook also said that it would launch its Brand Collabs Manager tool — which helps link creators with advertisers for branded content opportunities — in India next year. Facebook launched the program stateside back in June.

Facebook’s courtship of video creators in India is notable given that the country has come to represent a massive opportunity for competitor YouTube — where creators have already been able to monetize their videos with ads. Interestingly, Indian production company T-Series is anticipated to dethrone PewDiePie in coming weeks as the most-subscribed channel on all of YouTube — a telling signal of the country’s enormous potential as a digital video market.

Facebook says its next Global Creator Day will be hosted in the U.K. early next year.