Lately, YouTube has been gaining a whole lot of competition. From the likes of Facebook, Snapchat and even Twitter. These companies are all beginning to see the value of having video as part of their platform. However, they are having trouble bringing in creators to use their platforms. One of the main advantages that YouTube has over their competitors right now is the fact that they share a percentage of their ad revenue with creators. Which is part of how YouTube Creators make money – and are able to make videos as a living. Twitter is now beginning to do the same.
Select users are now able to add pre-roll ads onto their videos on Twitter. The company is limiting this to the US, for now and did also state that they would be sharing a portion of the revenue with these creators. However, they did not state how large of a portion creators would be getting. Twitter is making monetization easy to turn on for creators as well, they can opt-in for monetizing all of their videos by simply checking a box. This monetization will work not only on Twitter’s website but also on other platforms. For example, if someone embeds your Tweet with a monetized video onto their website, you’ll still get money from the pre-roll ads there.
It’s a start for Twitter, and could lead to another platform where creators can post their content and earn some revenue. However, they don’t have the advertising clout that Google has from the many years of running Adwords and Adsense for websites and other platforms. That will likely come though. This is yet another move that Twitter is employing to get more users using their platform. As their monthly active user numbers have seemingly hit a plateau in recent months. Twitter will likely bring this new pre-roll video ads over to other creators and to other countries, in the near future. For now, things need to be tested to see how they work or don’t work, before opening it up to all of their users. It’s worth noting that it has been opened up for creators of all sizes (some with millions of followers and others with just a few thousands).