Facebook is gearing up to challenge YouTube’s dominance of the online video market by copying YouTube’s existing practice of sharing advertising revenue with video creators who publish on its network

The social network which has 1.4bn active monthly users, says it will match the revenue split offered by Google-owned YouTube, and give certain video publishers 55 percent of the revenues generated by advertisements that run next to their video clips.

Video content providers like the NBA, Fox Sports and Funny or Die will be offered a significant slice of this ad revenue from the end of this summer.

This is the first time that Facebook as offered companies money for video content.

It hopes that the organic reach offered by the scale of its online network will encourage media outlets to publish on Facebook.

“A lot of [our partners] have said this will be a big motivation to start publishing a lot more video content to Facebook,” Dan Rose, Facebook’s VP of partnerships, said to tech site Re/code when discussing the deal. 

The company is developing a new 'suggested video' algorithm, so if you click on a MMA or cooking video, Facebook will offer similar videos, and hope to keep users on the site.

The company sees this as a 'win win' situation as it can attract leading media companies to provide video, offering cash and views to the providers, while growing its own ad revenue. 

Up to four billion videos are already viewed on Facebook every day, but the company is planning to increase this number.