

Source: Twitter’s Ad Platform Launches Tonight - davidedicillo
http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/12/source-twitters-ad-platform-launches-tonight/

======
jackowayed
Do people really search Twitter enough to make this their cash cow? (Assuming
they refrain from putting ads in the normal timeline, and just have them on
search.)

The last paragraph implies that that's what they're doing, but it seems that
searches are infrequent enough that it'll be hard for this to make them real
profits.

Plus, if people dislike the ads at all, at least one client (probably many),
will be "the ad-free client", and many people will start searching through
that/those clients.

~~~
tjarratt
I'm not sure that's true actually. The vast majority of users I've seen find a
client and stick with it. While power users will probably get annoyed by the
ads and find a new one, I suspect an average user will learn to cope, or
simply stop using the service.

~~~
jfornear
Yep, I just use the free Twitterrific client on the iPhone and it actually
serves high quality, unobtrusive, and occasionally _helpful_ ads via The Deck.
I've never been bothered by them enough to consider jumping ship.

Advertising isn't inherently undesirable, but even if it were, its annoyance
would still have to exceed the cost of migration for users to make a switch.

------
fookyong
It's certainly a tumultuous time if you've based your business on a "feature"
of Twitter that it could feasibly replicate itself.

<http://tweetup.com> launched just _yesterday_ proclaiming their advertising
value-add to the Twitter ecosystem. The atmosphere there must be pretty tense
today...

As for Promoted Tweets, I wonder how this affects the ToS for people who are
already using one of those tweet-brokering services. Are those services now
dead in the water? What about if you take direct payments for a sponsored
tweet and thus circumvent Twitter's ad platform - will this be against the new
ToS?

~~~
robryan
Well if someone decided putting all there eggs in the easy to implement
Twitter feature basket they are asking for trouble. I wouldn't assume there
was any feature that just worked around the Twitter API only that Twitter
might not implement themselves at some point.

------
milkshakes
i see the sponsored retweet market as more convincing than the sponsored tweet
one. targeting influencers based on the demographics/behavior (think retweet)
of their followers just seems so much more relevant than advertising against
search terms.

i know there are other services that already do this, but imho twitter should
consider offering this directly, alongside the search campaigns, so that
advertisers can manage all of their twitter campaigns from one spot. they
could also build a more convenient, "official" system that makes it dead easy
for influencers to sell out.

if they can't gain their own traction based on convenience, they always have
the option to pull an apple and simply cripple the competition through their
TOS (they could simply ban third party analytics services and sell the data to
the third party companies, or they could just ban other competition outright.
it's their platform, after all)

but that would obviously suck. hopefuly they won't do this.

------
alexro
I'm wondering about their seemingly dumb approach. In my opinion it would be
better to charge on per click basis for the links in the tweets. Say if want
your links to be clickable you route them through a specific shortener and
then Twitter counts the clicks. Others will have their links as text. Seems
pretty fair to me.

