Report: Facebook’s Premium Video Ads Will Cost $1 Million A Day

More details about Facebook’s upcoming “Premium Video Ads” have emerged and if you have to ask how much they’re going to cost … you know the rest.

The Wall Street Journal reported that such ads will cost about $1 million a day. We reported last month that Facebook is preparing to launch the new advertising unit in the next several months — Journal sources have narrowed that timeframe to the “coming weeks” — and plans to limit it to a small group of advertisers.

Facebook is trying to strike a balance between increasing revenue from the attention of its 1.28 billion active users and annoying those users with advertising. During Facebook’s quarterly earnings call, both CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg said they are committed to make Facebook ads as interesting and valuable to users as any other content.

To try to hit that mark with video ads, Facebook is working Mountain View-based ad testing firm Ace Metrix on an objective, quantifiable way to judge ads. The Journal article has more details about the ad rating system (and reaction from skeptical ad buyers):

Ace Metrix created a Facebook-specific rating for ads. In addition to its usual metrics like “desire” and “watchability,” Ace Metrix added a factor called “meaningfulness.”

For a high “meaningfulness” score, an ad must inspire “emotion” and “verbosity”—a measure of how much users write in their comments. Those factors, plus humor, contribute to the Facebook-specific “Ace Score.”

Read more in the Journal’s story (Subscription required).