Twitter shares advertising revenue with video producers

Twitter has taken a page out of YouTube’s playbook and started paying producers for video content delivered via the social network. The service, launched on Tuesday (currently only available to users in the US), offers a generous revenue share from pre-roll advertising played prior to video clips being run.

According to technology blog Recode, Twitter will pay video creators 70 percent of advertising revenues generated from the service. This compares to the 55 percent of revenues offered by YouTube.

While Twitter has previously offered major brands like the NFL a share of advertising revenues from videos “broadcast” via their Amplify service, the lack of a financial incentive for less prominent producers has meant that many users have abandoned Twitter and their other properties like Vine and Periscope (which the current deal does not yet include) in favour of channels where they can earn money.

Twitter’s move to pay content producers might be seen as too little, too late in a highly competitive market where YouTube and Facebook have not only been quicker to the market with financial deals but also command much more sizeable audiences.

YouTube currently enjoys more than one billion users compared to Twitter’s relatively small audience 313 million. It’s also worth remembering that Twitter is languishing behind social media services like Snapchat and Instagram in terms of daily unique users.

It’s also interesting to note, that while Twitter is clearly hoping their financial incentive will drive more quality content to the network and therefore increase engagement and advertising revenues, unlike Facebook Live, it is not currently paying users to produce content.

Social networks clearly believe the future of the social web is in high-quality online video. The question PR professionals and their clients should now be asking is how prepared are we to join this “televised” revolution?