While Twitter has managed to be popular with wide swaths of people, it hasn’t been very good at generating money. The owners of the micro-blogging site today unveiled “promoted tweets,” which will appear as paid ads in search results that the user can “re-tweet” to others. The first advertisers will be Starbucks, Bravo and Virgin America, which are already using the medium extensively for communications.
“We wanted to do something that just enhances the conversation that companies are already having with their customers on Twitter,” said Twitter Chief Operating Officer Dick Costolo. “We are not in a rush to make a certain amount of money this year. We want to get this right. We don’t want to force a model on people that is based on incorrect hypotheses.”
Considering the number of game companies that already use Twitter for promoting their games, having paid advertising on Twitter might make a lot of sense.
“Of all the places Twitter could include ads, this is the least obtrusive and the most relevant. People will not desert Twitter for this. It’s inevitable — technology services need revenue,” writes {link no longer active} Josh Bernoff. “Not only that, I expect it to be successful. Searches on trending topics are an inevitable place for mass market ads. But searches on other hashtags are also likely to generate interest from advertisers, and relevant ad tweets make sense here.”
Source: Ad Age {link no longer active}
