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Twitter to consider borrowing Facebook and YouTube’s video advertising strategies

Twitter Inc. is considering a few new ways to allow advertisers to make money from video content displayed in tweets – and its plans may combine autoplaying video ads, as well as getting advertisers to pay when consumers play videos ads they want to watch.

It seems Twitter is thinking of borrowing Facebook’s strategy of autoplaying video ads by automatically playing six-second previews in their own users’ feeds. If a preview catches a user’s interest, the user can then click to watch the video in its entirety, and Twitter can then charge the advertiser for the click – a move that comes out of YouTube’s playbook.

While a Twitter spokesperson would not confirm the social network’s new monetization plans, company executives spent some time discussing the plans with advertisers during CES this week, according to a story in Ad Age. The plans seemed to appeal to agencies that were briefed on Twitter’s plans, seeing that when taken together, blending autoplaying and the pay-to-play strategies is taking the best of what Facebook and YouTube have to offer.

In August 2014, Twitter announced it would be beta testing promoted video ads. However, when the announcement was first made, Twitter said users would click on promoted videos to watch them, with advertisers getting charged based on plays, rather than the number of people who happened to glimpse the preview in their feeds.

We reported yesterday on new research from eMarketer, which shed some light on how social media companies like Facebook and Twitter are banking on users sharing more videos on their platforms. When U.S. Internet users watch digital videos, they still spend 75 per cent of that time watching on YouTube, eMarketer found. Yet the firm also found users spent 33 per cent of their time watching videos on Facebook, signifying Facebook may have more of a part to play in video advertising.

While Twitter didn’t appear in eMarketer’s list of top streaming sites and apps for digital video, what’s clear is that it wants in on the action – and its latest plans for video may help the company woo more advertisers onto its platform.

 

Candice So
Candice Sohttp://www.itbusiness.ca
Candice is a graduate of Carleton University and has worked in several newsrooms as a freelance reporter and intern, including the Edmonton Journal, the Ottawa Citizen, the Globe and Mail, and the Windsor Star. Candice is a dog lover and a coffee drinker.

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Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

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