Periscope live-streaming videos getting pre-roll ads

Fariha Khan
March 29, 2017
1,437

Those of you who love to watch live-streaming Periscope videos should be ready to start seeing some pre-roll ads first. Twitter has announced that it will begin selling the ad-slots from now. The deal is an extension of the one reached before with ad company Amplify.

The ads are powered by Amplify, Twitter’s existing pre-roll video ad product, which the company uses to run short commercials ahead of popular video, like NFL or NBA highlights. In those cases, the content creators get roughly 70 percent of the ad revenue, and Twitter keeps 30 percent. A company spokesperson says these ad splits are “similar” to the existing Amplify deals.

It implies that just those brands that already have a partnership deal with Amplify will be able to see their videos monetized.

According to reports, Twitter is being careful in order to stay away from any issue that Google got into some time back, when notable brands found their ads embedded into hate videos on YouTube.

Twitter is only offering up a select group of publishers for brands to buy ads against, which will let advertisers know exactly where their ads are showing up. “This is the solution to that problem,” Matthew Derella, Twitter’s vice president of global revenue and operations, told Reuters. “We believe the advertiser should have control.”

The step is meant to help reverse Twitter’s slowing revenue growth, ad revenue falling in the final quarter of 2016.