Facebook video ad units could come with TV price tags – Facebook is reportedly prepping to sell its new video ads with an “upfront”-type marketplace and TV-like prices. According to AdAge, Facebook will have four daily summer slots — women over 30, women under 30, men over 30 and men over 30 — with an asking price close to $1 million. The exact ad format hasn’t been locked down, but it is believed that the videos will be 15-seconds long and users will see no more than three per day at launch. It is unclear whether the ads will autoplay in the feed or not.

More Messenger for Android users get free calling - Facebook this week released an update for its Messenger app on Android, bringing free VoiP calling to users in the U.S. and 23 other countries. Previously, this was in testing with Android users in Canada and iOS users in several countries. From Messenger, users can tap the “i” button inside a conversation and then select “Free Call.”
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Facebook today announced a deal with Rovi Corporation to use Rovi Video, a database of information about movies, TV shows and celebrities that can be used to improve search and discovery across its platform.

Rovi’s data helps power experiences like on-screen TV guides, iTunes, Flixter, BestBuy.com and many others. Facebook has been building out its “entity graph,” which are all the people, places and things that are represented with pages. Users primarily connect to these objects by Liking them, but now Facebook is making a push for users to do so through actions like “watch/want to watch,” “read/want to read” or “listen/want to listen.” Improving the metadata associated with these objects could give Facebook new opportunities when it comes to search, News Feed relevance, recommendations and offering new features for developers

Before the Rovi deal, Facebook used Wikipedia and Freebase to populate information about movies, TV shows and other entities, for example for the module on the “Star Wars: Return of the Jedi” page below. However, those sources are community-curated and not necessarily as reliable as what Rovi provides for many of the largest companies in the world.

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As the new Timeline and News Feed rolls out to more users, Facebook is providing more ways for users to share stories about the books, movies, TV shows and music in their lives. This week we found ways for users to add movies to their “watched” or “want to watch” lists directly from News Feed. Users can also do the same for other content they find on friends’ profiles.

For example, when users see stories in News Feed about items friends have added to their Timeline, they can click a plus button in the corner of the item and select a list to add it to and who to share it with. This became available for music stories last week, and this week we saw it become part of movie-related stories, such as the one below.

These features encourage users to connect with more pages, which ultimately improves the social network’s ad targeting, search results, News Feed relevance and recommendations.

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Netflix today announced that members in the U.S. can now connect with Facebook and share the shows and movies they watch with friends, after a decades-old law preventing this type of feature was amended earlier this year.

International users have been able to share their Netflix activity on Facebook since Open Graph launched, but U.S. users couldn’t. Instead, they came to know Open Graph as a way for video apps like Socialcam and Viddy to share automatically on their behalf as soon as they clicked a link. This year Facebook is focused on helping users share stories about more long-form content they consume — a movie instead of a 30-second clip, a book instead of a one-off article. Netflix integration is key to building out the video side of this strategy.

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When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg debuted Graph Search in January, he explained it as being one of the three pillars of the social network. He sees Timeline, News Feed and Search as the primary ways users experience the Facebook graph and build new connections.

Timeline is the company’s reinvented approach to the profile, and Graph Search is a new take on how to navigate Facebook and discover things about your friends and the world. But News Feed, despite its many redesigns over the years, hasn’t had the sort of transformation that the other two pillars have seen in the past 18 months. That’s bound to change, perhaps even this year.

Not only is News Feed due for an overhaul, reports from Business Insider and TechCrunch support this notion. Business Insider heard from someone close to Facebook VP of Product Chris Cox, who is reportedly tasked with evolving the feed. TechCrunch got a peek at an unlaunched version of the Facebook mobile app that puts content into more immersive feeds organized by category.

As Zuckerberg often explains, the amount that people share on Facebook doubles each year, whether because of new features like location tagging, third-party apps like Spotify or the proliferation of connected devices. Combine that with the explosion of Facebook page marketing and advertising, and it’s clear that News Feed will have to evolve. At Facebook’s current state, more sharing either means a more crowded feed or a lot of information left out. Neither is ideal, so we could see the company address this by giving users more options to see what they want when they want it.
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Facebook today released an update for its main iOS application, which includes voice messaging and video recording, as well as a more efficient way to hide ads and mark posts as spam directly from News Feed.

Voice messages are a new feature of Facebook’s standalone Messenger app that has been brought to the main app now, as it did on Android  little over a week ago. This allows users to send asynchronous voice messages up to 60-seconds long. The free voice calling feature, which is still limited to only certain regions, has not been added to the main app. It is only available via Messenger for iOS.

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Facebook is developing a new video ad unit that will autoplay within the mobile and desktop News Feed, according to a source familiar with the social network’s plans.

AdAge first reported about the new product, based on information from industry executives who were briefed by Facebook. Our own source confirms that Facebook has a feed-based video unit in the works and autoplay will be a key feature.

The new ad type could be a major draw for advertisers who have been asking for more prominent and immersive advertising opportunities on Facebook. Video is an especially attractive offering, but it could take some time for advertisers to determine what type of video works best in the Facebook feed as opposed to traditional display units, TV ads or even YouTube.

Advertisers can already pay to promote videos in the Facebook feed and sidebar by creating Page Post Ads and certain types of Sponsored Stories, but users have to click to play them. Facebook hasn’t done much to emphasize this video ad capability to the masses, and it really wasn’t until the second half of this year that advertisers began to take advantage of the unit. With the recent ability to place ads in the feed, videos are more prominent than before, which has encouraged some advertisers to try the format. See an example from McDonald’s Canada to the right.

Autoplay and other enhancements could make future video ad types even more effective, but maintaining a positive user experience is a delicate balance. AdAge reports that the company is still debating whether or not sound will be enabled automatically. The new video ads may also have a 15-second cap, which existing videos do not have. Relevance and frequency will also be key factors that affect how users feel about having the ads in their stream.

It’s unclear whether these ads will be limited to an audience that has already connected to a brand by Liking a page or knowing someone who has, but Facebook seems to be moving away from these requirements and allowing non-social ads to appear in the feed. The McDonald’s example, for instance, does not include any social context and was shown to a user who had not Liked the page. However, as we’ve pointed recently, Facebook’s mobile versions lack options for users to provide negative feedback about ads and opt-out of future messages from an advertiser. When the social network launches a new ad type, it should be sure to give users a way to report and hide videos they don’t like.

McDonald’s ad screenshot via Attention Industry.

Facebook is once again the second largest video site in the U.S., according to ComScore.

The social network saw 53 million unique video viewers in July. That’s about a third of Google’s audience, but higher than the number of unique viewers on Yahoo sites and Vevo, both of which were ahead of Facebook in May.

Although Facebook’s viewers are up from 44 million in May, average minutes watched per user is down from 27 to 21.7. That’s fewer minutes per viewer than any other site in the top 10 besides Amazon. Google sites, by comparison, averaged about 525 minutes per viewer. However, ComScore’s data only looks at U.S. video views, so Facebook’s global reach is not reflected in the chart below.

With YouTube, Google still dominates the U.S. web video space, but Facebook could possibly capitalize on its own reach if it ever pushed more in that direction. It seems the social network is heavily focused on photos first, but a number of video sites and apps, including Vevo, Socialcam, Viddy and Chill, have seen positive results from integrating Facebook Open Graph.

With advertisers constantly pushing for new ad formats, we wonder whether Facebook might introduce more video advertising opportunities. With the page post ads now being tested in News Feed, advertisers have more prominent ad space than ever. We could see some companies, particularly movie studios, pushing video ads in this spot.

Among online video ad properties measured by ComScore, Facebook doesn’t even rank. Google, Hulu and a number of video ad networks and exchanges make up the top properties in terms of total ads and minutes viewed.

Autodesk announced today that it signed a definitive agreement to acquire mobile video sharing app Socialcam for approximately $60 million. The transaction is expected to close by Oct. 31 this year and is subject to customary closing conditions.

Currently the largest Facebook-connected app with 54,700,000 monthly active users according to AppData, Socialcam allows users to create, edit and share videos. By integrating Open Graph, the app shares users’ activity to News Feed when they watch videos or take other actions within the mobile app, website or Facebook canvas app. This led to the app’s rapid rise to the No. 1 spot in May.

The mobile app also ranks No. 38 on AppData’s Top Free Apps on iOS and No. 5 on Top Free Apps Photography Genre in the U.S. The app saw a sharp rise in traffic in mid-April due to its viral sharing mechanics and requirement that users authorize it in order to watch a video, though some critics pointed out traffic was also being drawn in with popular YouTube videos marketed as user-generated content in a Socialcam wrapper. Recently the app has seen a decline in monthly active users, though it’s unclear to what degree this is because the app is not retaining existing users or because of Facebook changing its algorithms or design of News Feed.

Autodesk is known for its design software such as Maya, SketchBook and Pixlr, which makes it an odd buyer for an app like Socialcam.

The acquisition follows Facebook’s pending acquisition of Instagram for $1 Billion in early April and a heightened interest in startups and apps that allow users to create and share video and images on mobile devices. TechCrunch also reported in late April that Socialcam raised a round of seed funding from several well known investors such as Ashton Kutcher, Tim Draper and Yuri Milner.

Video app Socialcam once again topped our list of the fastest growing Facebook applications by monthly active users this week.

Titles on our list gained the most MAU of any apps on the platform, growing from between 900,000 and 15.7 million MAU, based on our AppData tracking service.

Top Gainers This Week

Name MAU Gain Gain,% 1.  Socialcam 69,900,000 +15,700,000   + 29% 2.  21 questions 18,300,000 +7,900,000 + 76% 3.  Zynga Bingo 7,800,000 +5,700,000 + 271% 4.  Truth Game 5,800,000 +2,400,000 + 71% 5.  Bubble Safari 4,000,000 +2,200,000 + 122% 6.  Scribd 23,900,000 +1,900,000 + 9% 7.  Candy Crush Saga 10,500,000 +1,600,000 + 18% 8.  MyCalendar – Birthdays 32,800,000 +1,600,000 + 5% 9.  Between You and Me 8,900,000 +1,400,000 + 19% 10.  Lost Bubble 3,300,000 +1,300,000 + 65% 11.  My Friend Secrets 3,800,000 +1,300,000 + 52% 12.  Bubble Blitz 3,100,000 +1,200,000 + 63% 13.  Truths About You 5,400,000 +1,200,000 + 29% 14.  Birthday Calendar 2012 ★ 3,300,000 +1,100,000 + 50% 15.  Pyramid Solitaire Saga 4,300,000 +1,100,000 + 34% 16.  DoAlbums 1,500,000 +1,080,000 + 257% 17.  Photo Contest 5,600,000 +1,000,000 + 22% 18.  Get Revealed 3,200,000 +900,000 + 39% 19.  Instagram 18,000,000 +900,000 + 5% 20.  Skype 16,000,000 +900,000 + 6%

Socialcam continues to burn up the charts as it approaches 70 million MAU. Most of that number seems to come from new users adding the app, as we can tell from Socialcam’s high number of daily active users but relatively low DAU over MAU percentage. Unless Socialcam can find ways to regularly engage its existing users, we’re likely to soon see a sharp decline in MAU. Facebook has also recently implemented some changes that could reduce the frequency of Socialcam stories in users’ feeds.

Canvas-based quiz app 21 Questions took the No. 2 spot this week after seeing an overall decline in MAU since March. Other quiz apps – Truth Game, Between You and Me, My Friend Secrets, Truths About You and Get Revealed – followed nearly the exact same growth trends, indicating that over the past two weeks Facebook has made some change leading quiz apps to gain traction again.

Instagram saw a bump in MAU this week after a mostly slow May. The increase could be the result of a new feature we discovered last week that puts an Instagram icon in users’ mobile feeds to direct users to the native Instagram app.

Zynga Bingo led games on the platform, though five others made the top 20 this week.

All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned for our look at the top weekly gainers by daily active users on Wednesday, and the top emerging apps on Friday.