WSJ: Twitter plans to sell ads on apps, sites of other companies

PanARMENIAN.Net - Twitter is laying out plans to make money from the millions of people who see tweets all over the Web but don’t actually use Twitter, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The social media company is planning to sell ads within streams of tweets on other publishers’ apps and websites, the Journal quoted people familiar with the matter as saying. Twitter laid out its initiative to media buyers in a presentation at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the people said.

It isn’t clear which publishers are on board. The presentation at CES made references to ESPN’s SportsCenter app and Flipboard. ESPN and Twitter have had talks about the idea, but so far haven’t finalized a deal, one person familiar with the situation said. Executives from Flipboard could not be reached for comment.

Twitter would share the revenue from the ads with the publisher, the people familiar with the matter said.

The social media company recently spoke to investors about just how big the audience is for Twitter content outside of the company’s large registered user base. Advertisers and agency executives said that was a big focus of Twitter’s pitch during CES this week. The company wants to be able to eventually make the claim that it delivers the “largest daily audience online.”

That’s all well and good, but investors want to see whether Twitter can make money off that huge audience. That’s where this new ad sales initiative comes in.

In addition to the plans to sell ads outside of Twitter, the company’s sales team walked advertisers at CES through its video plans, the Journal says. As has been reported previously, Twitter is planning to encourage users, advertisers and media companies to upload videos directly to Twitter. Sometime over the next few months, Twitter users should start seeing more videos play automatically in their feeds. Six seconds of these videos will play automatically, and people will have the option to click to play these videos in their entirety. Some details of these auto-play video ads were reported earlier by Ad Age.

While people are watching videos, Twitter will push forward a small preview of a related video, encouraging viewers to consume multiple clips in one session, said a person familiar with the matter. This could work well for advertisers looking to tell serialized stories, ad buyers said.

Sarah Hofstetter, chief executive of digital agency 360i, came away impressed with Twitter’s overall ad pitch in Vegas. “Twitter clearly listened to both consumers and the advertising community,” she said. “We’re very bullish on the new tools and opportunities.”