Facebook Watch is launching worldwide

Facebook Watch, the social network’s home to original video content and answer to YouTube, is now becoming available worldwide. The Watch tab had first launched last August, only in the U.S., and now touts over 50 million monthly viewers who watch at least a minute of video within Watch. Since the beginning of the year, total time spent viewing videos in Watch is up by 14x, says Facebook.

The company has continued to add more social features to Watch over the past year, including participatory viewing experiences like Watch Parties, Premiers, and those with audience involvement, like an HQ Trivia competitor, Confetti, built on the new gameshow platform.

Watch also offers basic tools for discovery, saving videos for later viewing, and lets users customize a feed of videos from Facebook Pages they follow.

Along with international availability, Facebook is introducing “Ad Breaks” to more publishers. These can be either mid-roll or pre-roll ads, or images below the video. Publishers can either insert the ads themselves or use Facebook’s automated ad insertion features. Facebook says 70+ percent of mid-roll ads are viewed to completion.

Ad Breaks are now offered to creators who publish 3-minute videos that generate over 30,000 1-minute views in total over the past 2 months; who have 10,000 Facebook followers or more; who are in a supported country; and who meet other eligibility criteria.

Supported countries today include the U.S., UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand. Next month, that list will expand to include Argentina, Belgium, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, The Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, France, Germany, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Peru, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Thailand, supporting English content and other local languages. More countries and languages will then follow.

:story: TechCrunch