It will essentially be the video equivalent of its popular ad product, promoted tweets, which are ads that look like tweets and appear in users’ content feed. The videos will be embedded into the tweets via Twitter’s “card” technology that supports other media-rich ads such as the recently released mobile app-install ad.
In a blog post, Twitter said the tests, which began earlier this year, “have shown that Tweets containing native Twitter video generate better engagement and more video views than before.”
Video ads could be a potentially lucrative product for Twitter, which began mixing advertisements and video with its Amplify service last year. Amplify lets networks such as the NFL distribute brief video replays of game highlights on Twitter in near-real time, with short ads embedded. Twitter splits the ad revenue with the networks.
With promoted videos, all of the ad revenue will go to Twitter. It gives marketers another outlet to tease shows and pitch products in video clips that can run as long as 10 minutes.
It also represents another brisk step into making Twitter a more visually appealing platform. For years, Twitter was a text-heavy service. In the last year it introduced image previews into the stream and a flow of ad types that support images, significantly changing the look and feel of the service.
“The overall goal is to bring more video into our users’ timelines to create a richer and more engaging Twitter,” said the company in a blog post.
The move follows closely on the heels of Facebook FB -0.84%, which introduced video ads in late 2013.
Unlike Facebook, however, Twitter’s video ads will not play automatically. Users will have to manually press play. Only then will Twitter get paid for the advertisement, a fee structure that is favorable to marketers and in line with its new charging system that only bills clients for specific user actions.
While the user-initiated decision to play the ad may be less detrimental to the overall user experience, it also makes it more difficult for Twitter to collect money from advertisers.
By Yoree Koh (WSJ)
