Public figures can invite friends, followers, verified public figures, or any listeners in the room to be a speaker. The host can invite speakers in advance or during the conversation. There can be up to 50 speakers, and there’s no limit to the number of listeners.
However, the feature, launched on June 21, is yet to reach popularity levels enjoyed by its competitors, with Facebook now employing several strategies to make it more appealing to the African audience.
The social network is betting on the experience of existing podcasters and internet celebrities for its initial roster of podcasts while planning to introduce a new feature called ‘Soundbites,’ which will allow users to post short audio snippets to their feed like they currently do with a photo or video.
Soundbites are short-form, creative audio clips for capturing anecdotes, jokes, moments of inspiration, poems, and any other things users can think of.
“We’ll start testing Soundbites over the next few months with a small number of creators and refine the product with their input before making it available to everyone. To start, we’re collaborating with creators to experiment with different concepts,” says Ms. Simo.
Artificial Intelligence
Through its advances in Artificial Intelligence, Facebook says it can make your audio quality sound good, even if you record from a busy street corner.
“You will be able to use music from Facebook’s Sound Collection in the background of your story to set the tone. And with the ability to mix audio tracks, a growing collection of sound effects, voice effects, and filters, it should be a lot of fun too.”
But Facebook is facing a huge challenge. Right now, it’s still too difficult for most people to create audio rooms, and the best audio creation tools are reserved for the pros.
“It’s still too hard to discover and share awesome audio content, and too cumbersome to assemble the right group of people to have a conversation about your favorite topic, at the right time,” admits Simo.
But she promises that the company is utilizing the full spectrum of audio technologies to solve these hurdles.
“From audio quality enhancements, captions, speech translations, and superhuman hearing, our goal is to make audio presence easy, natural, and immersive so you can more fully experience social presence.”
More than 170 million people are already connected to hundreds of thousands of podcast pages on Facebook, and more than 35 million people are members of fan groups around podcasts — but until now, you had to leave the Facebook app to listen to these episodes.
Discord, which launched in 2015 and has 100 million users, decided this year to pivot from an audio platform for gamers to an audio platform for everyone.
Make Money
But how will these audio features help creators make money? First, no advertising in Live Audio Rooms will be allowed, but listeners can pay to send their discussion hosts what Facebook calls ‘Stars’, which can be traded in for cash.
Those who send Stars will be highlighted in a special ‘front row’ section that everyone will be able to see. Listeners can purchase Stars packs during the conversation and send them anytime. Facebook takes a cut of the money users pays for Stars.
“We’ll also offer other monetization models, like the ability to charge for access to a Live Audio Room through a single purchase or a subscription. To kickstart Soundbites, we’re introducing an Audio Creator Fund to support emerging audio creators and get early feedback on the new product experience.”
Clubhouse, which had 10 million weekly users as of May, has launched an in-app donations feature as a means of supporting favorite creators, while Twitter will soon introduce a more traditional means of generating revenue from live events – selling tickets.
The company says it will begin rolling out applications for Super Follows and Ticketed Spaces to allow hosts to set ticket prices and how many are available to a given event, to give them a way of earning revenue from their Twitter Space.
10,000 Followers
Super Follows allow creators on Twitter to generate monthly revenue by offering paywalled content to followers who subscribe to them. To be eligible, users over the age of 18 need to have 10,000 followers and at least 25 tweets in the last 30 days.
Twitter will only take 3 percent of creators’ revenue after in-app purchase fees — but, on the App Store and Google Play, in-app purchase fees are 30 percent, which means that creators will take home about two-thirds of what their followers are paying.
“We updated our revenue share cuts after spending more time thinking about how we could support emerging voices on Twitter,” says senior product manager at Twitter Esther Crawford.
“Our goal is to elevate people driving the conversations on Twitter and help them earn money.”
Patreon, a web-based social audio platform for artists and web content creators, only takes between 5 percent and 12 percent of a creator’s earnings.
Clubhouse, which is slowly becoming the YouTube of audio, and Facebook’s Instagram have features that let listeners tip speakers or award badges in a live audio space, but the apps don’t yet allow for advance ticket sales.
Another way for top creators to make money on these apps is through Creator Funds. Spotify’s Greenroom and Clubhouse have both announced plans for Creator Funds, but it’s not yet clear how the earning potential will compare with selling access to Ticketed Spaces on Twitter.
Facebook’s entry into the audio trend is late but it remains to be seen how much it will offer content creators if it has to capture existing podcasters as the social network audio competition intensifies, with Microsoft’s LinkedIn and Salesforce’s Slack also working on their own audio room features.
Other audio streaming startups that are charging to the billion-dollar market are Riffr, Wavve, and Spoon.
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Article Source: nation.africa
1 Comment
Yes by all means give people more ways to become lazier and lazier every year that goes by!God forbid people get to stay home and spend quality time with their families, kids,pets etc. And the only problem they have to deal with for work is face timing in their work. When did Americans become such sissies and crybaby whiners? Jobs are supposed to be hard people which is why it’s called WORK! If it was always fun and glamorous it would be called relaxation!Quit whining ! So you have to look at a computer screen! Omg the end is near! So what happens when crybaby complainers complain about actually having to do their jobs? It’s made even easier on them by making it so they can lay around in pajamas and only have to use their voice to get paid!God forbid Americans ever had to deal with a war in their back yards we would see so many people fall apart because they can’t even comprehend what hard lives really are!