Frank Sinton CEO, Beachfront Media

At this month’s F8 conference, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg gave a big boost to the burgeoning business of live-streaming online video when he said it was a “top priority” for the company. The company has assigned 150 engineers to live-streaming, changed its News Feed algorithms to give live video higher visibility, and is paying several notable publishers (including the New York Times, BuzzFeed and Vox) to create original programming for the format.

That’s a serious commitment by the planet’s biggest social-media company. More interesting, perhaps, is what’s not yet attached to the Facebook offerings: figuring out how to pay for everything. The answers will help determine whether live streaming video becomes only a gimmick used by well-funded brand experimenters or narcissistic hobbyists. Done right, it could supercharge a bracing new platform with its own stars, best practices and yes, monetization schemes.

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Sometimes the cookie just crumbles. When it comes to digital advertising, who ever said that the browser cookie has to be king? Apps do not care about cookies. And if you haven’t been paying attention recently, apps make up the vast majority of time spent with digital media in 2015.

The mobile revolution has changed how we need to think about advertising. Smartphones provide the ability to target groups of people with extraordinary degrees of accuracy and automatically deliver the most relevant content to people. Programmatic and contextual ads are the evolution of advertising.

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The list of YouTubers who owe their success to YouTube alone is shrinking. After years of dominating the online video market, YouTube is no longer the only place where online video is happening. From big video outfits like Maker Studios, to independent YouTube stars like PewDiePie, video producers who got their start on YouTube are now looking beyond YouTube for their next act.

Diversify revenue streams. It sounds simple enough, but as smart a move as this is, there are plenty of potential pitfalls in its execution. Because as much as relying on YouTube as your sole revenue stream is a mistake, not fully taking advantage of the alternative distribution channels at your disposal - or using them haphazardly - is an even bigger mistake.

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