Dive Brief:

• Twitter’s Project Lightning is expected to launch this fall and will feature curated content around real-time events such as the Super Bowl or breaking news items such as natural disasters.
• During a panel at Germany’s Dmexco conference, Twitter revenue chief Adam Bain spoke about the project and how it can help solve some challenges facing Twitter and its users.
• In other recent news, the microblogging site began selling promoted video ads and tweets in third-party apps to reach a non-user audience.

Dive Insight:

Twitter’s Project Lightning has been publicly discussed since mid-June and is expected to launch this fall. The project involves curated content around real-time events and will include autoplay videos and photos around major events, such as the Oscars, and breaking news events. One key selling point of Project Lightning is the curated content will be available to anyone, logged in or not, allowing Twitter to reach people who are otherwise non-users.

At the Dmexco conference, currently being held in Germany, Twitter’s revenue chief Adam Bain provided some insight into Project Lightning. He said, "One of the problems with all of that content is actually finding the things that you care about. What Project Lightning aims to do is organize content for consumers in easy, digestible ways, even if they don't follow some of these accounts."

Bain also added, "For new users, one of the challenges have often been just the learning curve and amount of energy and effort it takes to set up a Twitter — so for those people, especially our logged-out users, they can bounce over and see what's happening in the world."

Conceivably Project Lightning could provide advertisers a channel to take advantage of real-time marketing opportunities, although whether this happens remains unclear.

Twitter made another recent move to reach a non-user audience by selling autoplay video ads and promoted tweets in third-party apps with the Twitter Audience Platform ad network.