The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge raised considerably more than $100 million for research into degenerative neurological disease. That's great. But the whole phenomenon was also pretty great for Facebook, which saw a huge, extended surge of usage, particularly video consumption, around the summer-long campaign.
Ice Bucket Challenge videos were viewed more than 10 billion times and reached more than 440 million people, according to Facebook. The company is capitalizing on all that momentum by trying to recruit top YouTube personalities to bring their content to its platform, according to the Wall Street Journal. Facebook is also adding vanity metrics to its videos to underscore their growing popularity.
How much was the Ice Bucket Challenge worth to Facebook in dollar terms? It's tough to say, as Facebook didn't monetize the videos directly with advertising. (Imagine the outcry if it had!) But you can come up with a very rough guess by calculating the rate at which it monetizes users' time in general and multiplying that by the amount of time they spent viewing Ice Bucket clips.
In the U.S., the epicenter of the Ice Bucket phenomenon, Facebook took in $1.308 billion in revenue during the most recent financial quarter, about $1.2 billion of it from advertising. Facebook has 204 million monthly active users in that region, and the average user spends 40 minutes a day with the service.
North American users, then, spent 734.4 billion minutes on Facebook during the second quarter. That yields an average monetization rate of $0.00178 per minute.
Now we have to figure out how much time users spent watching Ice Bucket Challenge videos. This gets tricky because, as Peter Kafka notes, what Facebook counts as a video play isn't necessarily what you or I would consider a play. Because videos in News Feed play automatically, Facebook considers you to have watched one if if starts autoplaying and you don't scroll past for some set amount of time they don't publicly disclose. I emailed Facebook PR to ask for data on the amount of time spent watching the videos but didn't hear back.
So let's say, arbitrarily, that the average play was five seconds. That would yield a total of 883 million minutes spent. Multiply that by the monetization rate and you get $1.48 million.
That's a meaningless number, for numerous reasons. For one thing, it doesn't take into account all of the other forms of engagement beyond video views that the campaign drove -- likes, comments, shares, etc. Justin Bieber's two videos alone received more than half a million likes. I also cheated a bit by using the U.S. time-monetization rate, which was somewhat easier to deduce, for all the video views, even though the campaign spread across the globe. Sorry about that.
In any case, I think it's fair to conclude that the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge resulted in millions of incremental dollars in ad revenue for Facebook, even before you consider the publicity value of the phenomenon and the role it will likely play in attracting big-ticket advertisers and YouTube stars to the platform.
For what it's worth, although they both participated in the campaign by making videos, neither Mark Zuckerberg nor Sheryl Sandberg was among the individuals called out by the ALS Association for donating more than $100,000. (T-Mobile CEO John Legere was, however.) It's always possible they donated anonymously, of course. Neither was Facebook among the corporations to donate at that level.
