Advertising news today: Facebook Watch, Snap’s latest exec departure

AP
Photo/Andrew Harnik

Facebook is hungry for video and taking lots of pages from
YouTube’s playbook when it comes to wooing over creators.

Earlier this fall, Facebook unleashed Watch
globally, opening up the company’s big bet on premium,
long-form video to the world after testing it in the US for a
little over a year.

As part of the rollout, Facebook started allowing anyone — from
users to publishers — to set up and fund their own Watch shows
through a self-serve tool called Creator Studio that is built in
to Facebook.

With Watch’s floodgates open and the ability for publishers to
bypass Watch’s funded team, Facebook is actively encouraging
publishers to set up and fund their own Watch programming in
exchange for making money from ad breaks, according to sources.

To read more about how Facebook is trying to kickstart growth on
Watch, click here.

In other news:

Snapchat’s parent company has lost its second top exec in two
months, as its head of original content
departs. Nick Bell, VP of content, is leaving
the company after nearly five years of building media
partnerships and developing original content for the mobile
platform.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Amazon will probably pick
New York City and Northern Virginia for its next two major
offices. An announcement is expected on
Tuesday.

Wall Street analysts expect Netflix to raise prices soon
— and say US subscribers would be willing to pay a lot
more. A survey of over 1,100 Netflix users from
analysts at Piper Jaffray found that the majority of subscribers
think Netflix’s content has improved in the past year and that
they would be willing to pay more.

YouTube is pushing back against a new EU copyright law, which it
says will massively restrict how many videos Europeans can
watch. CEO Susan Wojcicki took aim at the EU
draft directive’s article 13, which would force online platforms
to censor content that breaches copyright.

AT&T has notified a group of dealers who sell DirecTV
products that their contracts will end in December after a
terrible quarter for pay TV. The changing
business strategies in the unit may be another indication that
three years after its $50 billion acquisition of DirecTV, the
telco behemoth is still struggling to stabilize that part of its
business.