Twitter Adopts A New Video Ad Strategy Called ‘Twitter Amplify’

Last week Twitter showed off it’s new Moments feature, a way of organising and exploring content on the social network provided you live in the United States because the rest of us have been left out in the cold at the moment. Well, in case you haven’t noticed yet, Jack Dorsey has been busy since becoming the permanent CEO of Twitter. There has been a new announcement of some kind, big and small, nearly every day since he started!

The company is now taking a new approach to video ads and is adopting the approach which has been a big success for YouTube. Publishers and video makes will be able to upload their video to Twitter and Twitter will attach short pre-roll ads in front of the clips and split the ad revenue with owners. That is exactly how the world’s biggest video site YouTube does it too.

Now I know, I know you all hate the pre-roll ads and you stick ad blocker to work all over them. However, as I have pointed out before, your favourite content creators need that ad revenue to keep producing the content you love. Blocking those pre-roll ads takes out of their pocket, YouTube is one of the few sites I don’t block ads on myself.

The new strategy means that Twitter will have a setup much more familiar to the ad world and the world of video creators. While Twitter does not have anything like the volume of video content that YouTube has, they will be offering more attractive terms to get video makers using the new ad service.

At the moment, YouTube keeps 45 percent of the revenue from ads, Twitter is planning to take only 30 percent of ads sales which is a huge difference for the video creators which may look at using the service.

Even more critically, the move allows them to leapfrog Facebook which has yet to roll out a plan for generating revenue from all the video content which is now appearing on the social network site in the past year. Facebook have said they don’t want to use pre-roll ads and are currently testing different approaches. It seems to be a rare occasion where Twitter has managed to get in and launch a service ahead of their rivals.

The new video ad service is called Twitter Amplify and is a revamp of the old Amplify service. They have been hard at work recruiting video owners and creators to use it. Here are some of the big names which have signed up so far.