Twitter Announces Plan To Expand Ads To Publishers And Apps

Twitter unveiled its new advertising initiatives and video plans as the way that the company will reach its goal to “build the largest daily audience in the world.”

Twitter explained its plans to sell ads within streams of Tweets on other publishers’ apps and websites, thereby creating the potential to generate revenue from the millions of people who see Tweets all over the Web but don’t actually use Twitter themselves. According to the Wall Street Journal, the social media company also discussed its video plans in a presentation to media buyers at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Although the presentation made references to both ESPN’s SportsCenter app and Flipboard, it isn’t yet clear which publishers are on board with Twitter’s new initiative. However, the Wall Street Journal indicated that, according to sources, Twitter is in discussions with these companies and plans to share the revenue from the ads with the publisher. This information comes after reports that Twitter recently spoke to investors about its plans to tap into the massive audience that is available outside of the company’s already large registered user base.

The idea of ads that are embedded within streams could prove to be a very interesting proposition for publishers, with the possibility of creating a new social ad type. The company has been working on increasing its ad offerings outside of Twitter over the past year, such as with the acquisition of MoPub, and this new ad type could take it much further. Although Twitter’s new ad sales initiative has a great deal of potential, it has not yet been proven to work, and it will be interesting to see how it progresses.

Beyond its plans to sell ads outside of Twitter, the company’s sales team also talked about its video plans to advertisers at CES. Twitter is continuing to encourage users, advertisers and media companies to upload videos directly to Twitter, and users should begin to see more videos playing automatically in their feeds over the next few months. The company explained that six seconds of these videos will play automatically, and users will have the option to click to play the videos in their entirety. An interesting aspect of Twitter’s plans is the fact that while users are watching a video, Twitter can push forward a small preview of a related video to encourage users to watch multiple clips in one session. Marketers may find this functionality especially useful when they want to tell serialized stories, and may help Twitter in creating a strong place for itself in the world of online video ads.

The video auto-play feature may help Twitter in its efforts to catch up to Facebook’s massive growth in video. If its revenue-sharing ad type is well received, and the auto-play video functionality proves to be popular with users, these moves could provide Twitter with a great deal of momentum in its ongoing market share competition with Facebook and YouTube.