Next time you open Twitter, don’t be surprised to find a video ad at the top of your feed.
The social media company is marketing the new slot to brands as the best opportunity for reaching the whole of Twitter’s user base. And you can bet it’ll cost them a whole lot more than a regular ad.
Called “First View” and running with the tagline, “premium placement, maximum reach,” the new product is the latest effort by the company to increase ad dollars and boost revenue.
The video ad will remain live on the service for 24 
hours, Twitter said in a post announcing the new marketing opportunity, adding, “When users first visit the Twitter app or log in to twitter.com, the top ad slot in the timelines will be a Promoted Video from that brand. Now, marketers can tell a powerful visual story across the Twitter audience.”
Rather than use Twitter algorithms that target ads according to user demographics, First View video ads will appear across the platform to all users for an entire day. For brands advertising in the U.S., that means a potential audience of around 65 million people.
The ad will sit between the top and third tweets in a user’s timeline, making it impossible for users to miss. Whether they pause to watch it, of course, is another question entirely.
The new prominently placed video ad is available now to select partners in the U.S., while a global launch is planned “in the coming months.”
As Twitter learned over the weekend, fiddling with the timeline – or even the mere suggestion that it might – can provoke a huge and fiery response from the Twitter community, a reality that constantly forces the company to find a balance between achieving its objectives and keeping its user base onside.
Besides increasing ad revenue, the company is also determined to get more people using the site. User growth has slowed over the last 18 months, and with its latest quarterly figures out later today, nervous investors, as well as company executives, are desperate for good news on all fronts.
