Twitter launches First View: Autoplay video ads at the top of your feed
Get your earbuds ready: Autoplay video ads on Twitter will soon be unavoidable.
Twitter is rolling out a new ad unit called First View, which is a single video ad that straddles the top of users’ timelines and automatically plays every time the app or website is opened. Brands can buy the slot for a 24-hour period meaning it will become inescapable.
For brands, the ad unit has a significant advantage over buying a Promoted Tweet, which can get lost in the stream, or a pricey Promoted Moment, lives in a separate tab. For Twitter, First View offers brands guaranteed viewability and is another potentially lucrative revenue stream since video is more expensive.
“First View helps marketers achieve significant audience reach with exclusive ownership of Twitter’s most valuable advertising real estate for a 24-hour period,” Twitter said in a statement.
Here’s how it looks like in action:
Twitter said First View will debut first in the U.S. “in the coming months” before expanding globally.
For Twitter, the new ad unit is being debuted a day before fourth quarter and 2015 full-year earnings are revealed. To say the least, it’s been a rocky few months for on Wall Street for Twitter. This morning, the stock hit another record low, trading at $14.60 a share, meaning the company is valued at $9.3 billion, down steeply from its original IPO value of $14.3 billion in November 2013.
More in Marketing
Hyve Group buys the Possible conference, and will add a meeting element to it in the future
Hyve Group, which owns such events as ShopTalk and FinTech Meetup, has agreed to purchase Beyond Ordinary Events, the organizing body behind Possible.
Agencies and marketers point to TikTok in the running to win ‘first real social Olympics’
The video platform is a crucial part of paid social plans this summer, say advertisers and agency execs.
Where Kamala Harris and Donald Trump stand on big tech issues
The next U.S. president is going to have a tough job of reining in social media companies’ dominance and power enough to satisfy lawmakers and users, while still encouraging free speech, privacy and innovation.