Websites and services like Facebook and Twitter obviously would love it if you spent all your time on their platform. The longer you spend, means more ads can be shown, which in turn means more money. However, in Twitter’s case, watching YouTube videos means leaving their website.
This is something that the company doesn’t want which is why Twitter has announced that they will be testing out YouTube integration on its website. What this means is that tweets that contain YouTube videos will be able to be played within the tweet itself, kind of like if you were to upload a video directly to Twitter.
Starting today on iOS, we’re testing a way to watch YouTube videos directly in your Home timeline, without leaving the conversation on Twitter. pic.twitter.com/V4qzMJMEBs
— Support (@Support) March 18, 2021
As it stands, and this applies to most Twitter users, linking a YouTube video in a tweet will open a separate website which will force users to leave Twitter while they watch the video. Like we said, this isn’t ideal for these websites so it makes sense that they will want to try and keep its users around for as long as possible.
According to Twitter, this test will commence on the iOS app but we expect that it should eventually make its way to other platforms like Android, but the company hasn’t given any timeframe for when that will happen yet.