When we think of social media, the top three usual suspects come to mind: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Newcomers include Snapchat, Beme and just a sliver of barely mentionables. Let's not forget that Pinterest and Vine are still in the game too.
If we were to consider the "most wanted" social media, however, statistics are showing that Twitter is starting to fall lower on the list. User growth is wilting. Even if users do sign up, they soon find themselves as mere spectators who do not engage much at all.
Put all these puzzle pieces together and the big picture for Twitter is looking a bit hazy. In what may seem like a stereotypical Silicon Valley startup fashion, Twitter partied not for its demise but its resurrection.
Going back to its roots, with freshly appointed chief executive Jack Dorsey taking the lead, and rolling out a new feature called "Moments" to help newbies feel more at home when they start tweeting, the company has one more trick up its sleeve to keep money rolling in: video ads via Twitter Amplify.
"Publishers simply upload their videos to video.twitter.com to start monetizing their content, and are then paid the majority of the ad revenue through automated rev-share payments," Twitter describes the feature. "Advertisers can select categories of video content they want to run pre-roll with and can layer on additional audience targeting."
Twitter boasts some pretty big names joining the Amplify party: Fox Sports, MTV and National Geographic, among many others.
For users, this means they will be seeing six-second pre-roll ads (similar to YouTube ads) in front of video clips hooked onto tweets that stream through our timeline. The upside is that we might be seeing better and more frequent content from our favorite media outlets since they will be making money from their creative work.
In fact, a report reveals that Twitter will be taking just a 30 percent cut of the revenue, as opposed to Google's 45 percent cut from YouTube publishers.
Topping it all off, Twitter's senior product director for media, TV and video, Baljeet Singh, shares that users will also have an easier time adding media to their tweets. Instead of going to YouTube to find the latest Hollywood trailers and copying that link and pasting it into a tweet to share, users will simply just search for trailers within Twitter and tweet about it without ever having to leave Twitterverse.
Photo: Esther Vargas | Flickr
