Twitter to introduce advertising into your tweet stream, will it turn people off?
Twitter is reportedly planning more in your face advertising in an effort to boost the number of ways it can generate revenues and is talking to advertisers about introducing “promoted tweets” into the tweet streams of its users.
The move could have serious ramification for how people experience Twitter. At the moment the only tweets people see in their tweet stream are those that they have chosen to follow. Twitter’s plan would introduce advertising.
As the FT reports the move will likely “be controversial with users who have seen only limited and unobtrusive marketing messages so far in Twitter’s five-year history”.
“According to three people familiar with the situation, Twitter’s plans under consideration would see “promoted tweets” appear in their main timeline, the main focus of the Twitter website. Twitter had tested such ads with a third-party mobile client, HootSuite,” according to the FT.
The paper says the idea for promoted tweets in user’s Twitter streams has come out of talks at the advertising festival in Cannes this week where the likes of Adam Bain, head of revenue at Twitter, has been meeting with marketers and ad agencies.
The new Twitter ads would come in addition to promoted tweets and promoted trends and would put advertising more directly in front of Twitter users.
Twitter has claimed that ad engagement high for its existing marketing programmes is high,
Earlier this month Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said over 80% of Twitter advertisers come back and renew and claimed that average engagement rate with ads on Twitter was of “orders of magnitude” better than traditional media advertising.
He cited a Volkswagen ad for its new VW Beetle and said the promoted tweet had engagement rate of 52%. Twitter had been projecting to have around 100 advertisers by the end of last year. It ended up with 150 and now has 600-650 advertisers.
However, some reports have suggested that ads on Twitter do not work very well for some advertisers.
This raises serious questions about how effectively Twitter is able to monetize its 300 million plus registered users. Although Twitter itself has been bullish about its prospects and said at the start of the year it expected its ad revenues to hit $150m this year.
Most though are not going to be surprised by this move. As Techcrunch puts it the move is “inevitable”. It is part of Twitter growing up.
“We’ve been talking about Promoted Tweets in the timeline since we launched Promoted Tweets …” Twitter’s Sean Garret tells me. “We have and will continue to take a measured and thoughtful approach to how we may display them,” according to Techcrunch.
Twitter apparently wants the new in stream promoted tweets to only show advertisers that are “relevant” to users based on who they follow. Is that going to work? Based on some of the random people that Twitter suggests I follow I would guess with a deal of certainty that we will all see some pretty random ads in our streams.
The question is will it disrupt the experience? Will it turn people off of using Twitter? Ads will (I’m guessing) be capped and we will all see only a few a day. Show too many and then Twitter risks killing the golden goose and giving a leg up to those rivals we have been hearing about, which are waiting in the wings to take a slice of the microblogging market. Time will tell. Personally I have no problem with a few ads streaming my way as long as it doesn’t get in the way of how I use Twitter.
Twitter has to make money and I’m sure most people realise this. The ads are the price you pay for the service.
This does, of course, open the way for a possible premium ad free subscription service. Any takers for that?
All Comments
Twitter’s follow suggestions are of some use. If this reflects the relevence of how the Twitter feed ad will be they’ll have to fine tune it a bit. It will have to be modified to who follows who and what is being streamed otherwise it’ll be intrusive and a demand for a purer service will manifest..
300m users, ad revenues of $150m => revenue from advertising of 50 cents per user. I’d pay, say, $2 a year for no adverts, which isn’t a lot, and 4x the revenue they’d expect from me. I’d support that model.
Have to agree with Olly on his assessment of scrapping this big, ambitious ad plan (which, hasn’t Twitter been trying to do this for quite a while now?) and instead, going with a marginal pay model that brings in guaranteed revenues. Look, Twitter is at a great inflection point right now: either it quickly finds a way to generate serious revenues and profits or it continues to murk around with this utopian dream of never charging people a dime while its costs continue to soar, even as its user numbers go up.
The latter is not a tenable situation, at least not for the long term (see MySpace’s rise and dramatic fall).
Frankly, I’m not yet sold that Twitter has a viable ad or revenue model in place. A lot of what it seems to be introducing, indeed, a lot of what it always seems to introduce, comes from third-party app developers, such as HootSuite and TweetDeck, all of which have been running promoted tweets as part of user’s Twitter streams for quite some time.
Constantly taking ideas from your more nimble and savvy competitors, and then simultaneously, claiming that your product is far better than theirs, is again, not a viable business model.
I don’t mean to be so pessimistic about this, but I see Twitter flailing for a viable business model, when it really needs to be creating its own concepts for long-term, sustainable revenue streams.
Question is, can I filter the ads using tweet deck?
Vids75 that might be tough as Twitter has now bought TweetDeck and i were twitter i would make sure that its new ads worked across all platforms – web, web apps and mobile.
It would be nice to have the option. I would be willing to pay a small fee to keep them out of my stream of tweets. If they do introduce ads I would find it annoying and depending on the amount it could turn me off using Twitter as an information source. That said I appreciate that Twitter needs to make a $ from their product.
Twitter Plans On Introducing In-Stream Ads…
Twitter plans on introducing advertisements among the short messages that users see in the most active part of the social networking service, according to people with direct knowledge of its plans.Other commercial options under discussion include deals…
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