14 DAY TRIAL // In a move that's going to upset half of its users and make the other one extremely happy, Twitter has just announced it will be rolling out autoplay support for animated GIFs, videos, and Vines.
Contrary to what you expect, this change of policy was not made to simplify a user's experience on the site, this move catering more to advertisers rather than the userbase.
This will allow them to blast video advertisements at you while scrolling through the site's content, all without having to click or tap the screen.
Indirectly Twitter will increase its ad revenue through this change, allowing it to take on fellow social & advertising networks YouTube and Facebook.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Twitter management has been split over the issue for months, and this may be the actual reason former CEO Dick Costolo left the company.
It all seems pretty strange how the Twitter announced autoplay videos as one of the first major changes to the network right after their former boss quit his job following disappointing advertising revenue in Q1 results. Or not!
You can disable the autoplay behavior if you don't like it
Twitter's new change has already started rolling out to all users of its iOS and Web platforms, with Android users to be upgraded later on.
The good thing is that you can opt out video autoplay in your account settings page, for both iOS and the Web versions. You can see detailed instructions for the whole process on Twitter's support page.
As for measuring autoplay efficiency, Twitter will use Moat, an independent ad measurement firm. An advantage can be extracted out of this partnership for Twitter because advertisers have to trust Facebook or Google for ad efficiency while on their respective platforms.
Getting their data from Moat, a company certified by the Media Ratings Council and not tied to Twitter in any way, should allow them to trust the information they get to a much greater extent than they would do the one provided by YouTube or Facebook analytics.
See more, tap less - videos now autoplay on Twitter! Your thumbs deserve a break. đź‘Ť https://t.co/l73nC6Eq4o
— Twitter (@twitter) June 16, 2015
So Twitter, a 140 chars company, is allowing 15s and 30s pre rolls? Not a sustainable ad experience for a very short form platform >>>
— Ran Harnevo (@harnevo) June 16, 2015