Twitter will open up their live video function, Periscope, for advertising purposes in a bid to generate revenue. This means that your content of interest will now be preceded by advertisements for brands who buy pre-roll videos. The ads will run on both live and archived content.
Twitter made the announcement today, which marks a major move to compete with the likes of YouTube and Facebook and make more money. Monetizing video content has been gaining more and more popularity in recent times, but not without its fair share of disadvantages. So while both the company and the publisher stand the chance of profiting from putting ads in front of their content, it could also potentially hamper viewer interest. YouTube has also run into trouble with some advertisers after they disliked the content their ads were being used in and decided to pull out.
In order to avoid such mishaps, Twitter has said that it will only have a few selected publishers for brands to place their ads with, thus effectively ensuring that they reach the audience base of their choice via appropriate content. “We believe the advertiser should have control,” says the company’s VP of Global Revenue and Operations, Matthew Derella. Interested advertisers will also need to be partTwitter’swr’s Amplify program that aims to match them with publishers.
Twitter is definitely not alone in the decision to generate revenue from video content. Videos happen to be the favored platform of choice for advertisers for the kind of widespread interest they draw. Moreover, larger events have the potential to garner a dedicated viewer base, thus letting the brand reach out to more people. The latter is what Twitter is considering in the initial stages, when advertisements will only run on high-profile content such as sports or other entertainment events. There’s bad news for viewers, though, as they will not be able to skip the ads, and, because the ads will run on top of the content, will risk missing the portions where the ads will run.