What You Need to Qualify for Facebook In-Stream Ads.

Facebook in-stream ads pay a Page a share of ad revenue against video it published itself, in short ads that run before, during or after that video.

To qualify, Meta asks a Page to clear one of two sets of requirements.

For on-demand video:

• At least 5,000 followers.
• 60,000 total minutes viewed in the last 60 days.
• At least five active videos.

For live video:

• At least 10,000 followers.
• 600,000 total minutes viewed in the last 60 days, at least 60,000 of them viewed on live video.
• At least five active videos, including at least three that were previously live.

Underneath both sit conditions no amount of watch time overrides. You must be at least 18, based in an eligible country, and compliant with Meta’s Partner Monetisation Policies.

The phrase that decides everything is “in the last 60 days”. That is a rolling window, not a finish line, so being eligible is a state a Page has to hold rather than a level it reaches once.

Being eligible is a rolling window, not a milestone

Any requirement with “in the last 60 days” attached recalculates continuously. Today’s total drops whatever the Page earned 61 days ago and adds whatever it earned yesterday.

That puts qualifying in the same bracket as posting cadence and approval turnaround. It is an operations problem long before it is a content one, and it decays the moment the system behind it stops running.

The consequence is quiet. A Page can be comfortably eligible one month, publish very little for six weeks while the team is busy elsewhere, and be ineligible by the next, with no single decision that caused it.

Where in-stream ads sit now

Meta has been folding in-stream ads into a single programme. It announced Facebook Content Monetisation in October 2024, merging in-stream ads, ads on Reels and the Performance bonus into one, and said the combined programme would eventually replace all three.

Meta’s own page for that programme still describes it as invitation only, with open enrolment planned, and publishes no follower count and no watch-time figure for it. That is exactly why the requirements above are still the numbers to work to. They are what Meta states on its in-stream ads page today.

Two things follow. Once a Page moves across, Meta says it cannot join or rejoin in-stream ads, ads on Reels or the Performance bonus. And an invitation cannot be earned against a published number the way in-stream eligibility can, which is what makes the combined programme’s payouts harder to plan around.

One published route into the combined programme skips the watch minutes entirely. Creator Fast Track, launched in March 2026, offers three months of guaranteed pay for eligible reels to creators who already have at least 100,000 followers on Instagram, TikTok or YouTube, with immediate access to Content Monetisation attached. It rewards an audience built elsewhere, so it does nothing for a Page growing on Facebook alone.

The watch minutes that do not count

Meta is specific about what does not feed the 60-day total. Minutes viewed from crossposted, boosted or paid watch time are excluded, and crossposted videos do not count towards the active video requirement either.

The operating conclusion is blunt. The only thing holding eligibility open is the organic watch time a Page earns on video it published itself.

That catches two kinds of publisher. Network operators who push one video across a family of Pages find the satellites have almost no qualifying minutes of their own. And any Page propped up by media spend finds that none of the bought attention counts towards the thing that pays.

The daily run rate hiding inside the requirements

Divide the requirement by the window and you get a target a team can manage against.

• On-demand eligibility needs 1,000 qualifying watch minutes a day, sustained.
• Live eligibility needs 10,000 qualifying watch minutes a day, of which 1,000 must come from live video.

A run rate beats a pass or fail check because it shows direction. A Page on 70,000 minutes and falling is in worse shape than a Page on 62,000 and climbing, even though only one of them looks like a problem on the day you check.

Minutes are also not views, and the gap is wider than most plans assume. Ten thousand three-second views are 500 minutes. One video that holds two thousand people for five minutes is 10,000. The content decisions that produce watch minutes are not the ones that produce impressive view counts.

What quietly disqualifies a Page that looks eligible

The numbers are the easy part. Most of what removes eligibility is not a number at all, which is why a Page can look qualified on every chart and still earn nothing.

Meta’s condition is that the Page and its content comply with its Partner Monetisation Policies. That is a judgement about what you publish and where it came from, and it does not care how many minutes you earned.

The failure modes worth checking on any Page that depends on this revenue:

• Content you did not make. Reposted, aggregated or lightly edited video is the most common reason strong numbers earn nothing.
• Music and footage you do not hold the rights to use.
• Country. In-stream ads are only open to Pages based in an eligible country, and Meta’s list is not every market.
• Age. The 18 requirement applies to a person, not to a brand.
• Page and account status. A restriction applied for something unrelated to monetisation still sits above it.

There is also a difference between eligibility lapsing and eligibility being removed, and it decides what you do next. A lapse is repaired by publishing. A removal is not, and pushing more video into a policy problem only spends effort.

Originality is now part of qualifying

In March 2026 Meta said it is prioritising original content in Facebook Feed and Reels, reducing distribution for content that duplicates or makes minor edits to another creator’s post, and that accounts which keep posting primarily unoriginal material can be made non-recommendable and demonetised.

Its examples are specific: clips stitched together without adding anything, reacting with facial expressions, and narrating someone else’s video without a real contribution.

Meta said in the same announcement that views and time spent on original reels roughly doubled in the second half of 2025 against a year earlier, so this is a direction it is reinforcing, not a warning shot.

For a Page chasing watch minutes, that closes the easiest route to them. Reposting other people’s video was the fastest way to fill a 60-day window, and it is now the fastest way to lose the thing the window is for.

The five active videos rule catches people out

The follower and watch-minute requirements get the attention. The active video count is the one that trips Pages up, because it stays invisible until it bites.

Crossposted videos do not count towards it. Neither does anything deleted, archived or restricted during a tidy-up, so a Page that runs a quarterly clear-out can drop under five without anyone connecting the two events.

For live eligibility the trap is sharper, because three of the five have to be previously live. A Page that stops streaming keeps its on-demand position and loses its live one, and nothing on the content calendar says so.

Set a headroom band, not a pass or fail check

A single number against a single line gives nobody time to react. A band does. Meta’s published requirements say nothing about a grace period, so assume there is not one worth relying on.

The bands NBK uses for a Page that depends on in-stream revenue:

• Above 1.5 times the requirement, healthy. Keep publishing to plan.
• Between 1.1 and 1.5 times, check weekly and work out what changed in the mix.
• Below 1.1 times, treat it as an incident. Something in the schedule has slipped and there are weeks, not months, to repair it.

Those bands are ours, not Meta’s. Their job is to make somebody act while the back catalogue is still earning minutes, not after the revenue line has moved.

The monitoring cadence, and who owns it

Meta points Pages to its monetisation tools to check eligibility status. Wherever your team reads the number from, monthly is too slow, because a monthly report describes a decline that started five weeks earlier.

Weekly is right for any Page where in-stream revenue is a real line in the budget. It catches a slide while a fortnight of publishing can still fix it.

Ownership matters more than the tool. The number belongs to whoever owns the publishing schedule, not whoever owns the revenue report, because the schedule is the only lever that moves it. When Facebook and Instagram are run as a managed operation, eligibility sits on the same weekly review as reach, retention and publishing volume, and stops being anybody’s side task.

What to do the week you drop below

Falling out is recoverable. The recovery is mechanical rather than clever.

1. Check policy first. If eligibility was removed rather than lapsed, publishing more will not bring it back.
2. Count the active videos. Five is a low bar and easy to breach after an archive clear-out.
3. Rebuild the run rate with the formats that historically earned the most minutes on that Page, not the ones with the best view counts.
4. Lengthen where the audience will tolerate it. One piece that holds people for three minutes beats three that lose them in twenty seconds.
5. Set a publishing floor, the minimum number of qualifying videos a week that keeps the window fed even when nothing exciting is happening.

What good looks like

A Page that treats eligibility as a floor in the publishing plan rather than a metric in a report.

In practice that is a weekly glance at the rolling 60-day total, a publishing floor written into the calendar, one format on the schedule chosen specifically because it holds attention, and a named person who notices in week one instead of quarter three.

It also means being honest about dependency. If in-stream revenue is a real line in the budget, the schedule feeding it is not discretionary, and it is not the first thing to cut when the team gets busy.

How NBK thinks about qualifying for monetisation

NBK’s background is publisher-side, where watch time is the product rather than a metric. The team’s experience spans UNILAD, LADbible Group, SPORF and Social Chain, at a scale that runs to 600M+ views and 300+ years of watch time a month.

The pattern is consistent. Eligibility is rarely lost dramatically. It leaks, in a quiet quarter nobody flagged or a clear-out nobody checked.

The fix is never a clever piece of content. It is a publishing rhythm somebody owns and a number somebody reads every week.

Next step

Pull your Page’s rolling 60-day watch minutes, divide by 60, and compare the answer to 1,000. If it is uncomfortable, the problem sits upstream of monetisation, in what gets published and how well it holds people.

If your video output feels busy but is not holding people long enough to keep the window fed, start with an audit. Our social media audit checklist covers the publishing and reporting habits that decide whether a Page’s numbers hold, and NBK can help rebuild the schedule behind them.