Dick Costolo on How Vine Fits Into Twitter's Ambitions

Twitter showed Vine, the company’s six-second video service, a little love on Wednesday — including some public support from CEO Dick Costolo.

Costolo spoke about Vine’s place in Twitter’s overall product strategy at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference in San Francisco Wednesday afternoon, referring to the service as “integral.”

When asked where Vine fits in, Costolo said he envisions an “ecosystem” where Twitter’s new consumer video tool and Vine will working together. The details about how this ecosystem will work are still vague, but when Twitter launched consumer video a few weeks back, I suggested that the two services could compete; Costolo thinks they complement each other.

“Content creators want to go into an ecosystem, deliver a great experience to users and tell stories, and then make money from it,” he explained.

Those comments came just a few hours after Twitter announced the acquisition of Niche, a social media talent agency that pairs high-profile social media celebs (Vine has a lot of those) with advertisers that will pay them to push their products.

The acquisition will likely work as a new perk Twitter can offer advertisers, and Vine may now bring Twitter a little revenue in the process. Previously, these agencies were connecting brands and popular Viners, but Twitter wasn’t getting any of the cut.

“[Niche] helps us connect the Viners into the rest of the Twitter ecosystem, and the marketers in that ecosystem,” Costolo said.

Video is growing more and more important to Twitter. It wants users sharing video, of course, but more importantly, it wants advertisers to see how valuable Twitter can be as a video distributor.

Video ads can fetch big money, and Twitter is just dipping its toes in the water for now, but envisions video playing a much bigger role in its revenue plans down the road.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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