• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, July 22, 2015

As part of a broader effort to attract YouTube stars and other enterprising auteurs, Facebook is giving publishers more control over how their videos are organized and shared.

Set to roll out over the next several weeks, a new video uploading system gives Page owners customized distribution options, while the social giant is pitching a new Video Library as a simple and centralized place for managing videos.

As part of the redesigned uploading system, new distribution options include “secret videos” and the ability to prohibit embedding on specific third-party sites. Secret videos, so-called, allow Page owners to upload videos that are accessible only via a direct URL, but which are not searchable for people on Facebook.

“We’re building tools to help video publishers grow their businesses on Facebook,” Anaid Gomez-Ortigoza, a product manager at Facebook, writes in a new blog post.

“This is useful for publishers who want to host videos on Facebook, embed them on third-party sites or share them with anyone who has the URL, without posting them anywhere else on Facebook,” according to Gomez-Ortigoza.

New control and customization features include the ability to restrict the audience of a video by age and gender -- in addition to location and language, which are already available. Page owners can also now set an expiration date for a video, but still retain its insights after the video has been removed.

Another new feature is the ability to publish videos directly to the Videos tab for one’s Page, without distributing to News Feed or Timeline.

Facebook has reportedly been struggling to lure YouTube stars and other amateur video producers, and these changes are clearly intended to change that.

In June, video ads captured their highest share of Facebook ad spend ever (22%), according to a recent report from Nanigans.

Video continues to attract greater portions of Facebook ad spend, with video enabled units accounting for 16% of total spend in the second quarter 2015 -- up nearly a fourth from 13% in the first quarter of the year.

Representing another source of ongoing growth, mobile video has been particularly attractive to advertisers on Facebook, with 21% of total global mobile ad spending going toward the format in the second quarter – up from 15% in the first quarter. This growth was even more pronounced among gaming advertisers, with mobile video capturing a 36% share of mobile spend in the second quarter -- up significantly from 19% in the first quarter.

For the fifth-straight quarter, Facebook ad CTRs hit a new high (of .88%) in the second quarter of the year.