Twitter will begin testing advertising in Fleets, its competitor to the “stories” features on platforms like Snapchat and Instagram that let users post ephemeral updates.
It’s one way Twitter is working to monetize users and create new revenue streams.
“Fleet ads are full-screen billboards for advertisers,” Twitter senior product manager Justin Hoang and global product marketing manager Austin Evers wrote in a post announcing the ads. It’s partnering with a “handful” of advertisers in what it calls an “experiment,” making the Fleet ads visible to a limited group of US users on iOS and Android.
The ads support images and video in 9:16, and videos can be up to 30 seconds long. Brands can choose to add a “swipe up” call-to-action and will be able to access standard Twitter ad metrics, including impressions, profile visits, clicks, website visits, and other information.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said during April’s Q1 earnings call with analysts that the company was still learning about who uses Fleets. “We started this product not to build a storage product within Twitter, but to solve the problem of people not wanting to tweet because they appear to be staying around too long,” he said, adding “we certainly have seen a different audience than we normally see, but we still have much to learn and a lot to figure out in terms of like, where it goes from here.”
Twitter is planning to closely study how vertical full-screen ads perform, not just for Fleet ads but possible future iterations of other full-screen formats, according to Hoang and Evers.
“We also believe that ads should be non-intrusive and bring value to people, so we’re focused on learning more about how people feel about and engage with this new placement,” the blog post states, adding that the company is planning to launch more Fleet updates soon to stickers and backgrounds.
To start, the new ads are available to just “a handful of advertisers” and will be visible to a “small group” of US Twitter users. But the company hinted that if the experiment goes well, it may introduce the full-screen ad format elsewhere on Twitter. “We want to understand how this content performs for customers not just for Fleet ads, but for future iterations of full-screen formats on Twitter,” the company said.
The new ads come as Twitter has introduced new ways to monetize its platform. Twitter also began experimenting with shoppable tweets, though that test isn’t available in ad form yet. It’s also working on a $3/month “Twitter Blue” subscription service, and ticketed Spaces, which allows users to sell tickets to audio chats.
