Twitter video ads, crucial to company's success, go into beta today

Video on Twitter is going to be a very big deal, as analysts will tell you. Sponsored tweets with videos embedded can be viewed by logged-in Twitter users or by people browsing sites where the video tweets are embedded.

To advertisers and marketers there’s great value in both, Twitter’s tests of the content this year show that viewers, on Twitter and off, are more likely to engage with video tweets than other kinds of tweets.

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Twitter says today that the video ads are going into beta, so some advertisers can begin buying in. The tweets don’t auto-play videos as Facebook video posts can. Rather, they require a click from the viewer to roll.

Twitter Promoted Video, as it’s called, is an extension of the Twitter Amplify advertising initiative the company announced earlier this year.

The announcement comes at a time when the micro blog is trying to demonstrate the reach and engagement power of sponsored tweets — especially on mobile — versus the sponsored posts that Facebook sells.

Sources in the interactive advertising industry have told VentureBeat that the video tweets are seen as “highly attractive.”

Twitter further sweetens the deal by charging advertisers on a cost per view (CPV) basis, so they pay only for the number of videos that were actually played by viewers. Twitter says its providing advertisers a special set of analytics tools for tracking the reach and engagement levels of the video ads.

“Video is an incredible storytelling medium and we’re thrilled to be giving brands, publishers and a subset of verified users the ability to share organic and Promoted Video on Twitter,” says Twitter’s TV and video product manager David Regan in a blog post Tuesday.