In a pitch to media buyers at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, Twitter caught the attention of folks with a variety of improvements on par with the shiniest of the gadgets. According to The Wall Street Journal the pitch to media buyers included two major new advancements. The ability to show Tweets on a site or app that can have ads enabled for a revenue split with the publisher. The second element was an auto-play feature for video that would help Twitter keep up with Facebook’s video efforts.
The ads embedded within streams is an interesting proposition for publishers that may also benefit the social giant. Much to the chagrin of Facebook, Twitter is the undisputed real-time leader. Facebook has been making strides in the past few years with hashtags, Graph Search and video but the option of showcasing Tweets with the ability to profit in the process would be hard to beat. According to the WSJ the presentation given referred to sites like ESPN and Flipboard, but no official deals were announced.
This would really be a revolutionary new social ad type — an AdSense for social ads. Over the past year Twitter has beefed up its ad offering outside of Twitter itself with the acquisition of MoPub and this would take it one step further.
Another element mentioned in the presentation was the fact that “over the next few months” users should begin seeing ads start auto-playing in their feed. Videos will begin auto-playing for 6 seconds with the option to play in full upon a click. In addition to the video at hand, related videos will also be shown so that users can consume more than one video in a single session.
These opportunities would be quite significant both for Twitter and for publishers. The rev-share ads would be ground breaking and likely very well received and the video changes could help Twitter win back marketshare from Facebook and YouTube. For the full report see the Wall Street Journal.
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