Jack Dorsey, Twitter CEO.REUTERS/Lucas Jackson

For some time now, Twitter has been a company in decline.

Once it reached the 300 million monthly active user landmark, its once-meteoric growth stalled. Revenue growth is slowing down too. And with the company still yet to turn to turn a profit, Twitter needs to do something drastic in order to achieve its publicly stated target of reaching GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) profitability by 2017.

But Twitter has a plan.

Speaking on the company’s third quarter earnings call on Thursday, Twitter COO Adam Bain repeatedly mentioned his « OLV » strategy. 

« OLV » stands for « OnLine Video ». The online video ad market represents a « $9 billion – $10 billion » opportunity, according to Bain. 

For its second consecutive quarter, video was Twitter’s biggest ad product by revenue and its fastest-growing, Bain said.

For years, people have been tweeting along live as they watching traditional TV. The company famous for 140-character text posts is going all-in on TV-like video.

Twitter says the video bet is showing signs of paying off

Twitter has been building up to this for a while now.

In, 2012 it bought short-form video service Vine (and shut it down on Thursday — although it never had ads). Twitter launched its Amplify video product in 2013, which allows brands to complement their TV advertising or programming with Twitter ads. Twitter acquired live video-streaming app Periscope for $86.6 million last year. Periscope hasn’t necessarily become a mainstream app — it only has about 10 million users — but it’s taught Twitter a lot about live video, which is where Twitter sees a huge growth opportunity.

From September this year, Twitter began streaming Thursday Night Football games. Twitter said on the earnings call that the three most recent games attracted more than 3 million viewers overall. In TV rating terms (which typically look at how many people watched within a specific timeframe) the average audience per minute would have only been in the low hundreds of thousands (and lower than the 2.36 million people per minute who watched Yahoo’s NFL livestream last October.)

Twitter COO Adam Bain.

Nevertheless, advertisers have been lapping it up. Bain said a dozen « high-tier » brands bought NFL packages in the past quarter.

« It’s a very valuable ad product: sound-on video ads, in-between high quality content, and with completion rates now that are industry-leading, » Bain said.

What has also been encouraging about the live video ad deals, according to Twitter’s chief financial officer Anthony Noto, is that it Twitter has been able to bundle in its other ad products as part of an overall package.

This year, Twitter also livestreamed the presidential debates. Noto said Twitter achieved a record amount of daily active users (although he didn’t provide an exact figure) on the days the debates aired. 

Democratic presidential nominee former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton walks off stage as Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump looks on during the third U.S. presidential debate at the Thomas Mack Center on October 19, 2016 in Las Vegas, Nevada.Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Noto said 70% of the audience for the debates and NFL was under 35 — the highly lucrative demographic advertisers want to reach, and the kind of viewers that are more likely to cut the cord and watch less traditional TV. Users don’t need to be logged in to watch its big live video content, so it’s a way the Twitter can monetize an audience that isn’t registered, keep them engaged for longer than if they were simply reading a single tweet, and hopefully tempt them to sign up.

What’s coming down the line

The next quarter is going to be the big test to see whether Twitter’s live video bet can make a material positive impact on revenue. Noto said, having broadcast just two NFL games in Q3, there was only a « small » revenue contribution, but the company is expecting a « more monetized » Q4. (Seasonally, Q4 is also the most lucrative quarter for advertising companies.)

Noto said Twitter is improving the live video product. It is working on making the tweets that appear in the live video feed more personalized, such as bringing in tweets from people you follow (not just tweets created by other people watching the live video feed, or people using a specific hashtag) or making sure it surfaces Patriots fan tweets to Patriots fans and Texans tweets to Texans fans, for example.

The live lineup is also expanding. Twitter will also be airing NBA and NHL games, plus financial content from the likes of Bloomberg and Cheddar.

Noto said such deals are « very positive from an economic standpoint » because it offers to partner with content owners, agree a revenue split, and make the partner’s brand prominent. Those type of partnerships reduce the « economic burden, » Noto said, because the benefit to content partners isn’t just about ad dollars but also helping them reach a young, global audience on mobile.

Bain said recent measurement, targeting, and supply improvements have helped more marketers shift their online video budgets to Twitter. He added these are « new incremental budgets. »

In other words, people aren’t spending less on other Twitter ads in order to increase the amount they spend on Twitter video ads — it’s just more money going in Twitter’s direction.

Will it work?

Twitter is nowhere near alone in pursuing a video strategy.

Every major online platform is increasing its video output. Facebook even launched a huge multi-million dollar advertising campaign earlier this month to encourage people to post more live videos. And broadcasters have years and years of experience of streaming content online.

One of Facebook’s new ads for live video.Facebook

Tom Goodwin, executive vice president and head of innovation at Publicis-owned media agency Zenith, told Business Insider that Twitter’s « great strength » is its number of highly engaged, influential, and desirable (from an advertiser’s point of view) users.

eMarketer

« When you have so much valuable attention captured and you’ve got a clear platform to build off and can leverage personal data to serve video ads more precisely than most then you’re in a great place, » he said.

Where the issue may lie for Twitter is that the other platforms vying for the $9 billion to $10 billion online video market Bain is looking to take a chunk of — YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat, Hulu, and so on — come from a better starting point.

 « They either have brands, user experiences, expertise or rights that are more useful to transition into this space. If Twitter can leverage their essence as a place for conversation, more aggressively explains their presence on other screens via their Apple TV app and onto other devices, platforms and screens, then it could perform well, » Goodwin said. « But due to the competition ahead, I don’t see this as the future of Twitter but a healthy side business. »

Videonet is a leading source of strategic insight, analysis and news about post-convergence television. We explore the challenges and opportunities for the TV industry as it introduces more on-demand content and evolves towards multi-screen delivery, companion experiences and a hybrid broadcast/IP connected TV universe

[This unedited press release is made available courtesy of Gamasutra and its partnership with notable game PR-related resource GamesPress.]

Hamburg, Germany, October 27, 2016 – It is
no secret that Flash is on the downgrade and will disappear from
browsers in the near future. In order for Shakes and Fidget players
to continue their adventures in the browser, the developer Playa
Games has converted its successful MMORPG to
HTML5. To celebrate
today’s Open Beta start of the HTML5 version, the
multiplatform MMO has also been expanded by lots of new challenges
and new content. 

Flash Is Dead

When Shakes and Fidget was first released in 2009, the platform
choice was clear: a Flash-based online game that all players could
easily and comfortably enjoy through their browsers. In 2016,
however,
Flash is
no longer in keeping with the times and will
disappear from browsers. That is why Playa Games decided to switch
to the
safer and more modern HTML5 standard in the
future. With a
self-developed converter, all titles of the
Hamburg-based developer and publisher are gradually converted to
HTML5. Taking the lead, Shakes Fidget can now be tested in a
public beta version. In order for the HTML5
version to run as smoothly as its Flash counterpart, Playa Games
will use the
community’s feedback to further enhance the
performance of the HTML5 version. Interested testers and RPG fans
who cannot or do not want to install the Flash Player can reach the
HTML5 version of Shakes and Fidget at
http://sfgame.us/. All other players can enable
HTML5 in the game’s settings.

More Action

As part of the modernization, Playa Games has also created the
technical capabilities to
merge some
game worlds in the next few weeks. Over the years,
Shakes Fidget has grown steadily, adding new servers with new
worlds. These server consolidations offer quite a few
advantages for role-players: friends, who have
been playing on different servers so far, can now
experience their
adventures together. Furthermore, groups of
players can look forward to new challenges and
new competitions, as
guilds will be moving to new servers as
well. Nobody has to worry about losing their in-game progress,
because all characters and scores will be preserved.

New Content

Shakes Fidget also has some exciting new content and
features to offer.
The Twister is a new dungeon with a total of
1,000 floors. And exploring the dungeon system is
surely worthwhile:
three new epic sets are waiting to be salvaged by
the heroes from the depths of the Twister. Finally, players can
make use of the new
Quicksand Glass of Impatience which allows you to
finish an adventure directly without a waiting period and without
having to spend a mushroom.

More information on the
HTML5 Open Beta and on the
update are available in the forum at
http://forum.sfgame.us and on the official
Facebook page at
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Shakes-Fidget-The-Game/107431265996255
.

Useful links:

Website:
http://sfgame.us

Steam:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/438040/ 

Twitter:
https://twitter.com/sfgameofficial 

YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6K5-KlTXQfegDHDkHAB9QQ
 

About Shakes Fidget – The Game

The multiplatform MMORPG Shakes Fidget combines an ironic
look at fantasy and RPG clichés with in-depth RPG gameplay.
With its guild system, humorous quests, PvP arena and customizable
heroes, the cult-comic-book-style game has everything that MMO
players desire. Shakes Fidget is available to play by its 50
million registered players in 21 languages on Steam, in browsers,
on iOS, Android, and Windows 8 Phone devices.

(c)iStock.com/kuarmungadd

I’ve been reflecting on my first six months at Tremor Video, and realised that much of what I’ve heard from partners in the market fits into a few key themes. These themes are hugely illustrative of the challenges marketers face in an increasingly video-focused world, so I have pulled together the following guide to unlocking the value of programmatic video:

Be aware of the scale challenge

Many publishers, and buyers for that matter, still prefer to trade video via private marketplace deals, even though it limits scale and requires a seller to have an active relationship with a buyer to ensure the deal is successful. A lot of the buyers we speak to prefer to spend their budgets in an open auction, relying on their technology to buy the right audience at the right price, therefore avoiding any issues with scale and private deal set up. Many publishers also use a hybrid private marketplace and an open auction strategy.

Work with a team that gets video

Many sellers employ their existing display SSP to trade their video inventory, but it is clear that display SSPs are simply not built to accommodate video. Some sellers go down that route because they don’t have that much video to sell, but we’ve learnt that the vast majority of premium sellers are now focusing on video, with many saying that ‘video is at the heart of their content strategy’. The BBC’s plan to increase video five-fold in 5 years and the Telegraph’s focus on how best to distribute their existing video content to users across their site to increase scale, being examples of that trend. The demand for an SSP partner that specialises in video is now mission critical.

A global partner is key

Employing an SSP with global footprint is a great way of monetising what a direct sales team can’t sell locally.  Most of the big premium sellers in the UK have a (sometimes large) slice of their inventory available in the US, Canada and Australia. Some publishers are even seeing demand across the LATAM, SEA and MENA markets.

As video generates such high CPMs, even if a seller only has a couple of 100k video requests which aren’t being sold, it’s worth them working with a partner who can help them sell these options programmatically. SSPs represent the publisher and have tools in place to ensure that the seller’s inventory, wherever it’s coming from, is being sold at the right rate to the right demand partners.

Direct deals are still winning

Sellers often favour direct deals because they can get a fixed price, a guarantee on volume and they know how much budget they’re going to generate up front. With private deals, whether they are on an unreserved fixed rate or via an invite only auction, either the price isn’t fixed or the revenue isn’t guaranteed, which can be a little nerve wrecking for sellers.

Whilst premium video inventory remains fairly scarce, direct sales will continue to represent the lion’s share of publisher’s video ad business. Programmatic is certainly growing fast, but I don’t see direct deals going away any time soon. Some sellers who favour direct deals are progressively turning to automated guaranteed (we’ve seen this pervasively in Australia). It is certainly a trend we are watching closely and have been advising our UK sellers on.

Watch those deal-IDs

Unreserved fixed rate deals and invite only auction are set up via deal-ID. This requires a manual set up process from both the buyer and seller and any number of variables can lead to a days or weeks of troubleshooting. It is also true that when you set up a PMP of any kind, you have to manage it. A buyer could purposefully stop buying, it wasn’t working for them, its performance wasn’t good enough or they’ve spent their budget. Alternatively, they may not have realised they weren’t spending and they need to fix their system, or their PMP was set up incorrectly, for example the end date was reached and needs to be reset etc.

Watch your rate in the Open Auction

Sellers who use multiple SSP/networks/reseller partners to trade their video inventory and are not necessarily employing the right partners and controlling where their inventory is going. This often results in them being undercut by partners who are reselling their inventory on the open auction for less than the seller is aware and what the inventory is actually worth.

SSPs need to work with sellers to educate them about how to safely trade their inventory and the buyers also need to be aware of what they are actually buying. For instance, if a buyer sees video inventory at $10 in the OA for a national newspaper, common sense should prevail, as it’s probably not the ‘real deal’ at that price. Our objective is to get buyers and sellers to work more closely together, communicate more, so that every party involved wins.

As you can see there are lots of challenges in the video ad space at the moment, but there are huge opportunities too. Video is growing, so businesses need to be brave, but they also need the right partner to help them chart those waters to really unlock the value of programmatic for video.

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Adomantra, the new age online video advertising solutions company, is planning expansion in well established markets like the UK and US and growing market like Middle East. The online video advertising industry has been growing enormously due to increasing number of people watching online videos. Hence, these markets are gateways for brands to gain foothold to a larger target audience.

With the expanded outreach Adomantra will cater to its partner agencies and brands in a highly effective manner in the key markets. The company expects to generate revenue USD 1 million in this quarter, as the response in the first month is encouraging.

Vikas Katoch, founder and CEO, Adomantra said, “Online video has been growing exponentially across the UK and globally, as internet users experience higher bandwidth, more compelling content and multiplicity of network choices. The video consumer behaviour has helped in penetration of online video advertising along with high click through and ROI.”

Katoch further added, “If brands, advertising agencies and publishers want to take full advantage of the rising markets, they will need the help of newest innovative technologies for optimal visibility and impact of ads. Adomantra with Adomatric technology, which is its propriety algorithm, ensures maximum ad visibility to the right target audience.”

Adomantra has already maximized video ads for more than 200 of the Fortune 1000 companies worldwide and has relationships with the top 100 global brands. Serving more than 10 billion ad impressions, Adomantra has helped automobile, FMCG, telecom and handset manufacturing sectors build long-term relationships with appropriate media partners globally.

Adomantra brings to the table strategies based on the changing behaviour of internet users and potential of digital platforms. With innovative technologies in programmatic advertising, business analytics and intelligence tools, Adomantra ensures maximum video ad visibility to brands and advertisers.

Vessel announced today that its video subscription service is being acquired by Verizon, where its capabilities will be used to further the telecommunication giant’s online video ambitions. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Vessel will be shuttered on October 31.

Current subscribers will be provided complimentary access for the rest of the month, and those with annual plans will be refunded back to the beginning of October.

Founded by Jason Kilar, Hulu’s former chief executive, Vessel served as a mobile video service that provided a selection of content from around the web for $2.99 per month. To differentiate itself from competitors like YouTube, Vimeo, and Hulu, Kilar’s startup was limited to short-form content with a 72-hour exclusive period.

Major television networks that signed agreements to have content featured through Vessel included Discovery Digital Networks, the Science Channel, AE, NBC, and even the National Basketball Association (NBA). At one point, Vessel targeted YouTube’s top talent to grow its library. Vessel’s catalog of shows was likely part of what made it appealing to Verizon — not only in terms of video, but for advertising purposes.

In a blog post, Vessel makes it clear that at the heart of the transaction is its “technology, product, and team that we have built. These three things will be married with Verizon’s ambitions in online video.” Unfortunately, not everyone will be kept on board following the acquisition. Kilar will remain with Vessel until the end of the year to ensure a smooth transition, and his cofounder and chief technology officer, Richard Tom, will oversee the integration.

This is the latest push by Verizon to bring on more content publishers — including AOL, Yahoo, and now Vessel. The acquisition of a video service also comes days after the telecommunications company’s nearest competitor purchased Time Warner for nearly $86 billion.

Reports of Vessel’s acquisition by Verizon first surfaced last month. Kilar’s startup raised more than $132 million in venture funding from investors like Benchmark, Bezos Expeditions, Comcast Ventures, Greylock Partners, Institutional Venture Partners, Saban Capital Group, and Third Wave Digital.

[This unedited press release is made available courtesy of Gamasutra and its partnership with notable game PR-related resource GamesPress.]

Hamburg, Germany, October 27, 2016 – It is
no secret that Flash is on the downgrade and will disappear from
browsers in the near future. In order for Shakes and Fidget players
to continue their adventures in the browser, the developer Playa
Games has converted its successful MMORPG to
HTML5. To celebrate
today’s Open Beta start of the HTML5 version, the
multiplatform MMO has also been expanded by lots of new challenges
and new content. 

Flash Is Dead

When Shakes and Fidget was first released in 2009, the platform
choice was clear: a Flash-based online game that all players could
easily and comfortably enjoy through their browsers. In 2016,
however,
Flash is
no longer in keeping with the times and will
disappear from browsers. That is why Playa Games decided to switch
to the
safer and more modern HTML5 standard in the
future. With a
self-developed converter, all titles of the
Hamburg-based developer and publisher are gradually converted to
HTML5. Taking the lead, Shakes Fidget can now be tested in a
public beta version. In order for the HTML5
version to run as smoothly as its Flash counterpart, Playa Games
will use the
community’s feedback to further enhance the
performance of the HTML5 version. Interested testers and RPG fans
who cannot or do not want to install the Flash Player can reach the
HTML5 version of Shakes and Fidget at
http://sfgame.us/. All other players can enable
HTML5 in the game’s settings.

More Action

As part of the modernization, Playa Games has also created the
technical capabilities to
merge some
game worlds in the next few weeks. Over the years,
Shakes Fidget has grown steadily, adding new servers with new
worlds. These server consolidations offer quite a few
advantages for role-players: friends, who have
been playing on different servers so far, can now
experience their
adventures together. Furthermore, groups of
players can look forward to new challenges and
new competitions, as
guilds will be moving to new servers as
well. Nobody has to worry about losing their in-game progress,
because all characters and scores will be preserved.

New Content

Shakes Fidget also has some exciting new content and
features to offer.
The Twister is a new dungeon with a total of
1,000 floors. And exploring the dungeon system is
surely worthwhile:
three new epic sets are waiting to be salvaged by
the heroes from the depths of the Twister. Finally, players can
make use of the new
Quicksand Glass of Impatience which allows you to
finish an adventure directly without a waiting period and without
having to spend a mushroom.

More information on the
HTML5 Open Beta and on the
update are available in the forum at
http://forum.sfgame.us and on the official
Facebook page at
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Shakes-Fidget-The-Game/107431265996255
.

Useful links:

Website:
http://sfgame.us

Steam:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/438040/ 

Twitter:
https://twitter.com/sfgameofficial 

YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6K5-KlTXQfegDHDkHAB9QQ
 

About Shakes Fidget – The Game

The multiplatform MMORPG Shakes Fidget combines an ironic
look at fantasy and RPG clichés with in-depth RPG gameplay.
With its guild system, humorous quests, PvP arena and customizable
heroes, the cult-comic-book-style game has everything that MMO
players desire. Shakes Fidget is available to play by its 50
million registered players in 21 languages on Steam, in browsers,
on iOS, Android, and Windows 8 Phone devices.