Twitter today introduced Promoted Video ads in beta. The company is offering advertisers a new Cost Per View (CPV) ad buying model, which means they only get charged when a user starts playing the video ad in question.
The beta launch expands on the company’s Twitter Amplify program, giving brands a new set of video tools for uploading and distributing video on Twitter. They can also measure the reach and effectiveness of their content with new video analytics, including completion percentage and a breakout of organic versus paid video views.
Promoted Video ads follows the Twitter Video Card tests the company started experimenting with earlier this year. Unsurprisingly, Twitter found that tweets containing native Twitter video generate better engagement and more views.
Twitter claims “The overall goal is to bring more video into our users’ timelines to create a richer and more engaging Twitter.” We doubt that. The overall goal is to increase the company’s bottom line.
If the goal was to bring more video to Twitter, the company would be testing things like EmbeddedVideo, a bot that automatically tweets the embedded video in a link so that you can directly see it in your stream. In general, the company would be experimenting with getting users, not advertisers, to post more videos.
The tests of Twitter’s native video solution are now available to additional, but still “select,” content publishers and verified users. “Video is an incredible storytelling medium and we’re thrilled to be giving brands, publishers and a subset of verified users the ability to share organic and Promoted Video on Twitter,” the company says.
Again this is a beta launch, so you can’t just dive in and start using Promoted Video. If you want to, you’ll have to get in touch with your account representative.
See also – Twitter introduces mute feature on Android, iPhone, and the Web and Twitter’s analytics dashboard now includes detailed data on all tweets, not just ads
Top Image Credit: Andrew Burton/Getty Images
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