Skip to main content

Full-screen video ads could soon make their way to Twitter on your smartphone

vdovichenko/123RF
Twitter’s journey to profitability has led it to a familiar place for smartphone users — full-screen video ads in its mobile app. A tweet by Samya Ayish out of the #Twitter4News event in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, revealed the company’s plans to open up its Moments feed to advertisers.

This news comes just days after Twitter unveiled an initiative to integrate video from a wealth of providers, like Bloomberg, BuzzFeed, Major League Baseball, and Live Nation, as it expands into live and original programming. Moments ads will take the form of short, vertical videos roughly 10 seconds in length, like the interstitials that play in Snapchat and Instagram Stories, according to Mashable.

If you’re not familiar with Moments, it’s Twitter’s collection of curated tweets based on trending topics. Users can create their own custom Moments feeds as well, outfitting them with any tweets they like.

If Twitter can make a dent with its exclusive video offerings, getting eyeballs on these ads shouldn’t be much of a problem. Problem is, that looks to be a pretty big “if.”

For comparison’s sake, Snapchat’s efforts to pull its 161 million daily active users into branded content have fallen somewhat flat. A survey conducted by Fluent in February found that 61 percent of roughly 3,300 American adults reported they did not subscribe to a news organization on the platform.

It could be argued, conversely, that Snapchat’s strength is in exclusive content shared among friends and Twitter has done a much better job of capitalizing on the news. However, the latter has had a tough time expanding its user base, which sat at just shy of 330 million back in February.

Twitter is also arriving somewhat late to the party. Recently, rival Facebook has made a major push toward monetizing video, implementing more mid-roll ad breaks in tandem with a greater investment in original programming and video-sharing features.

Editors' Recommendations

Adam Ismail
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Adam’s obsession with tech began at a young age, with a Sega Dreamcast – and he’s been hooked ever since. Previously…
Thanks to Tapbots’ Ivory app, I’m finally ready to ditch Twitter for good
Profile displayed in Ivory app

Ever since Elon Musk took ownership of Twitter, it’s been one chaotic new thing after another. You literally cannot go a day (or a few days or even a week) without some stupid new change to the site — whether it’s about checkmarks for verified or Twitter Blue subscriber accounts, how links to other social networks are banned and then reversed, view counts on Tweets, or something else. I can’t keep up with every little thing that has happened since the beginning of November, and it feels like the spotlight is always on the toxicity of the site in general.

New Twitter alternatives have been popping up recently, but it seems that the most popular one continues to be Mastodon. I originally made a Mastodon account back in 2018 when it first launched, but it never clicked with me back then, and I eventually went back to Twitter. With the Musk mess, I tried going back to Mastodon, but again, it didn’t really click with me — until Tweetbot developer, Tapbots, revealed its next project: Ivory.
The significance of Tapbots and Tweetbot

Read more
Forget TikTok — it’s time to ban Twitter
Phil Nickinson's empty Twitter feed.

There are few sane headlines of late when it comes to social media. And if there are, they're probably about Facebook, which is just a sign of how weird things have gotten.

With the headline for this story, we manage to squeeze in both TikTok and Twitter. The platforms, to refer to them in the industry parlance, couldn't be more different, though we won't insult you as to try to describe them here. (If you really do need help, ask your kids. Don't have kids? Find one. They'll know TikTok. Need an explainer on Twitter? Ask a journalist, or your nearest bot farm.)

Read more
Many Twitter accounts could soon lose blue checkmarks
Twitter Blue menu option on a white screen background which is on a black background.

If your Twitter profile page currently displays a blue checkmark and you’re not planning to subscribe to Twitter Blue, expect to lose the mark before too long.

Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, said on Monday that “all legacy blue checks” will be removed “in a few months,” adding that the way they were given out was “corrupt and nonsensical.”

Read more