Facebook Announces Live Stream Monetization for Gamers

In an effort to make live streaming on Facebook worth anyone's time, the social network has announced a new monetization system for live streams on their site. The program is called Gaming Creator Pilot program.

According to a press release, Facebook is looking for ways to allow viewers to support their favorite live streamers "via payments during select live streams on Facebook."

Unlike ad partnership on YouTube, or ads/subs on Twitch, Facebook intends to provide a way to "tip" whoever they are watching with small, one time payments. This is essentially the Bits program on Twitch, where viewers give a digital currency known as bits to the streamer. Viewers can purchase bits for a cash value, in which they can distribute these to Twitch live streams that qualify.

To further solidify the legitimacy of the service, the company claims that streams will be able to maintain 60 frames per second at a resolution of 1080p.

It'll be hard to get people interested in this idea, especially since there are much better options elsewhere. They already had received some bad press with their recent ESL partnership. Those interested in applying for the service can do on Facebook's Creators page.