Auto-playing videos come for your Twitter feed.
Following in Google’s and Facebook’s footsteps, Twitter is rolling out its first autoplay videos in a push to draw in users and boost the value of its advertising platform. For years the online economy ran largely on banner ads—those flashy, often ugly, typically rectangular, embedded images that surround the content you actually want to see.Baljeet Singh, Twitter’s product director for media, TV and video, said autoplay for native videos, Vines and GIFs will help “get a better sense of what’s been shared instantly.” “It used to be that watching a video on Twitter required several taps.
The social network announced Tuesday that Vine videos, GIFs and clips created through Twitter’s recently launched video sharing tool will all default to playing automatically on the social network.“Your thumbs deserve a break,” the company tweeted Tuesday morning, because it just eliminated that extra tap needed to play GIFs, Vines, and in-line videos.
So when something was unfolding in real time, be it an NBA finals game, your favorite TV show or breaking news, that extra effort meant you could miss something that you care about,” Singh said in a blog post. “Once you tap the video, sound will turn on and the video will continue to play in an expanded view. Twitter’s shift to autoplay videos, rumored for several months, follows in the footsteps of Facebook, which began testing a similar option in late 2013. Adam Bain, Twitter’s head of revenue and partnerships, tweeted out some stats to support the move: People are 2.5 times more likely to prefer auto-play videos to “other methods,” and will “complete” viewing of a promoted video seven times more often if it autoplays. If you’re somewhere with high data rates or you have low bandwidth on your device, we’ll opt you out of autoplay to avoid unexpected charges or slow performance; so you’ll continue to see videos as click-to-play,” Singh said.
Sure, the particularly attention-deprived and unmotivated might find it a relief not to have to go through the trouble of tapping their smartphones to watch an infinitely looping six-second clip. Like Facebook, Twitter framed the move as making it “easier” for users to consume video. eMarketer, a marketing research firm, projects that video ad spending in the U.S. will grow from $7.8 billion this year to nearly $10 billion next year. Perhaps least popular of all is the autoplay video, which is enjoying a recent surge in popularity with advertisers and the websites and mobile apps that depend on them. To improve the accuracy of its metrics on video ad campaigns, Twitter will soon be working with multiple third-party vendors to more transparently measure an ad’s success, the company said.
Twitter will charge advertisers for a video view when the video is “100% in-view on the user’s device,” presumably not partially off screen, and after it has been watched for three seconds or longer. The worst autoplay videos plead loudly and distractingly for your attention, like a kid in class who jumps out of his seat to blurt the answer rather than waiting to be called on. The company just rolled out a new ad format, the Promoted Video, which it will only charge a brand for if the clip plays 100 percent in view for at least three seconds. That pitch to marketers is particularly important now to Twitter as the social network struggles to convince Wall Street of its mainstream user growth and revenue growth potential. The move comes five days after Twitter’s CEO Dick Costolo announced that he will step down on July 1st, with cofounder Jack Dorsey stepping in as interim CEO, and less than two months after first-quarter earnings when Twitter missed revenue expectations and promised to bolster its advertising business.
Plenty of ad dollars go to the Internet, but it is yet to be seen whether Twitter will make itself a third must-buy among ad giants Facebook and Google, which are seen as essential parts of any ad budget. Ads won’t be the only videos that autoplay in your feed, of course, but they’re the ones engineered to bring Twitter the revenue boost its shareholders so crave. (Facebook introduced autoplay videos last year, and its fortunes have surged.) Before you reach for the opt-out setting, however—and don’t worry, I’ll tell you how to find it in a moment—it’s worth considering the ways in which the new crop of autoplay videos has improved on those that came before. The steps could not be simpler: It doesn’t appear that Twitter has pushed video autoplay settings to the Web app yet, though, so for the moment you have to use the mobile app in order to change this.
You can expect to see autoplay strike today on iOS and on the Web; this is one case where Android users benefit by lagging behind, but it’s “coming soon” for them as well. If “autoplay” has become synonymous with “obnoxious,” it’s largely the fault of those primitive autoplay ads that blare sound at you from who knows what tab and who knows where on the page. They’re so intrusive and irritating that most browsers now take steps to counteract them, like the little speaker icon in Chrome that calls attention to the offending tab so you can close it. (Apple just added a similar feature to its Safari browser.) You’re right to despise and shun them. Click that little “play” button almost anywhere on the Web, including YouTube, and there’s a good chance you’ll be hit with a 30-second or minutelong ad before you’re allowed to watch the video you wanted to watch.
Knowing that most people will skip past such videos altogether, websites feel compelled to heavily monetize the minority that clicks on them, often testing the limits of users’ patience in pursuit of ad revenue. And so it is that we all waste little chunks of our lives staring at counters that tick off the seconds until we’re allowed to skip ahead. (Yes, I’m aware that Slate’s videos are among those that often come with pre-roll ads.) Facebook’s success with autoplay videos suggests that there’s a better way.