Facebook: animated avatars, blogger tax, and short videos

Publication date: 10 Mar 2021

A new generation of avatars

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the company is developing VR headsets with built-in technology for tracking the user’s face and eyes. Future VR headsets will be equipped with all the necessary sensors to generate realistic animated avatars. In the future, realistic avatars will allow you to make real eye contact with someone and display real emotions. Facebook intends to introduce a new generation of avatars in 2021.

Cooperation with Russian bloggers. Tax deductions from foreign companies

The Russian authorities are planning to oblige foreign platforms to pay personal income tax to the budget system of the Russian Federation for cooperation with Russian bloggers who make money on advertising. Foreign companies such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, etc. will be subjected to that by the law. Such a measure will increase the budget revenue from the Russian bloggers activities. According to the research company BloggerBase, only in 2020, video bloggers in Russia earned about 18 billion rubles. As a rule, bloggers who are actually very active and effective market agents, as foreign companies often employ them to advertise various products and services, receive money to their personal account. Banks and tax offices do not qualify such payments as commercial incomes.

Short vertical videos – similar to TikTok

In the summer of 2020, Instagram launched the Reels feature – the analog of TikTok, which allows you to create short vertical videos. The service has already started testing Facebook the pilot launch will take place in India. Instagram and Facebook users will be able to post their Instagram videos directly to Facebook. Also, the social network app will launch its own version of Reels. Up to 15 seconds long videos will be displayed for your friends to watch and seen for all the users in the social network. After the service started to show videos being downloaded from TikTok, Instagram changed the algorithm of recommendations and lowered the output of videos with watermarks of other services.