Get ready to see Gordon Ramsay in your Facebook news feed, right next to your high-school friend’s endless wedding updates.
Gordon Ramsay is one of the celebrities that Facebook will pay to make videos for Facebook live. (Image: Getty)
Facebook has agreed to pay more than 140 celebrities (including Deepak Chopra, NFL player Russell Wilson and Ramsay) and media companies (CNN, the New York Times, BuzzFeed) to use Facebook Live, the live-streaming feature the company is making big bets on. Gawker Media, Gizmodo Australia’s US partner, has also entered such a deal.
So while Twitter is launching a “celebs-only” app to keep the important people safe from us unwashed masses, Facebook wants to bring the beautiful people (which include DJ Armin van Buuren and the FC Barcelona team) right to us. And then we will bring the advertising money right back to Facebook.
The idea is that we all love video anyway (remember Chewbacca Mum?), and if we can also get our news and our celebrity fix right in one place, we will never leave the Facebook main page so long as we live. Why spend all that energy clicking through NYTimes dot com, or a celebrity’s site, when they will come to you?
Then, the longer we’re on the Facebook site, the more eyes are on advertisements on the side, the more data there is for Facebook to track and the more the dollars come rolling right back in. Thanks, Gordon Ramsay.