Twitter Testing YouTube-Like Video Advertising Model With New Amplify Offering

“With this update, advertisers can run video ads against premium content automatically based on their preferred content categories – without having an existing publisher-advertiser deal in place”, said Regan.

Twitter will place six-second ads – called pre-roll ads – in front of the video clips uploaded by publishers and split the revenue with publisher.

Facebook says it doesn’t want to deliver pre-roll ads and it’s unclear as to whether advertisers will care to engage with the company’s less-than-direct offering.

Video publishers on Twitter can expect to see more ad revenue headed their way.

Twitter made the announcement at an event for advertisers and marketers in New York City, where executives also talked about the broader vision for video on Twitter.

The expanded Twitter Amplify ad-buying program is available initially only in the U.S., with plans to roll it out globally in the future.

Twitter’s doing a lot of things right in its effort to increase ad revenue.

Publishers like the National Football League that want full control over which brands buy ads can continue to sell them through their own sales reps.

Advertisers can select categories of video content they want to run pre-roll against and can layer on additional audience targeting.

“Twitter video is now open for business”, Baljeet Singh, senior product director of media, TV and video, said at Twitter’s VideoNOW event.

In the new, open version of Amplify, an advertiser no longer needs to work with a specific publisher.

Twitter is trying to jumpstart its sagging user growth and engagement with a slew of new features and under the leadership of cofounder Jack Dorsey who took over as the company’s new permanent CEO this week.

“With this new offering, it’s never been easier to monetise and sponsor videos on Twitter”, Regan said. He showed an example of a Twitter user embedding a Star Wars video clip in a tweet. It was during this time that Twitter introduced autoplay for video.