

Twitter Unveils Plans to Draw Money From Ads - snewe
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/13/technology/internet/13twitter.html?ref=business

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leftnode
Something like this doesn't bother me at all. I enjoy using Twitter for free,
and as long as the ads are targeted based on what I search for, they can be
quite useful.

If they aren't too intrusive (and I doubt they will be), this sounds alright.
It's just surprising they haven't done it sooner, which probably shows the ads
won't be intrusive. If Twitter were hellbent on making tons of cash as soon as
possible, they would've thrown ads all over the place quickly.

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eplanit
Just to make sure you're on the record accurately here, and that your world
view is consistent.

You enjoy watching ads on TV, hearing them on radio, reading them on
billboards, seeing them on buses, in subways, on milk cartons, benches, ...

It's always OK if it's free, right?

And, they _are_ hell-bent on making cash. Everyone who seriously applies
themselves, as they are doing, are hell-bent on making cash. They've acquired
a huge base of users who, inexplicably, find value in their wares.

You and those masses are hooked, and now you're advertising targets. Happily
so, in your case.

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lunchbox
_"According to comScore, Twitter.com had 22.3 million unique visitors in
March, up from 524,000 a year ago"_

The 524,000 figure looks fishy. Compete.com puts Twitter's April 2009 unique
visitors at 19 million (versus 21 million for April 2010).

~~~
dustyreagan
Compete's stats are WAY off. At least for my sites. I suspect they are for
others too.

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lunchbox
Could be, but given the Twitter hype last year, 524k seems off by an order of
magnitude at least.

~~~
code_duck
I agree, I don't think 524k to 22.9m sounds even remotely reasonable. Twitter
was larger than that last year, and did not grow by 4400% in one year.

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JacobAldridge
As with Google Adwords (especially PPC ads appearing when I search) this makes
sense and, as long as there's a limit to how many ad-tweets appearing at one
time, doesn't concern me. After all, if I tweet that I'm headed to Starbucks
and get a reminder of their current promotion, that's of potential benefit to
me.

Admittedly, the Twitter site itself is far too restrictive to provide me with
useful communication data anyway, so I use TweetDeck to track conversations,
topics, and mentions. With more real estate, ads would be less cluttering to
me.

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Qz
_"...Twitter’s announcement is the first significant step toward a business
model."_

That statement seems so odd.

~~~
_delirium
Especially since they're already profitable...

~~~
smanek
Is that sarcasm?

To the best of my knowledge, they don't even have any significant revenue
(besides bigger and bigger VC rounds ;-)) - let alone having hit
profitability.

~~~
_delirium
They got about $25m from Google and Microsoft in return for real-time data
feeds, which is by itself enough to make them profitable:
[http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/dec2009/tc200...](http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/dec2009/tc20091220_549879.htm)

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franck
" _Once Twitter figures out how to measure the number of people who read posts
other than on Twitter.com, it will also allow third-party developers to show
ads and share revenue._ "

Now this is interesting. Twitter 3rd party clients would finally have some
sort of business model too!

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gojomo
It's not quite what they've announced, but I think there's potential in the
idea that advertisers would pay to promote positive things people are already
saying.

There's serious trust/disclosure issues to work out -- burying bad reviews and
promoting good ones for payola is what makes Yelp seem a bit slimy. But if
advertisers can pay to multiply any little positive thing said by someone real
near you, who you already know isn't a professional shill, it could have
legitimate influencing power.

Facebook's fan pages are also in an excellent position to try such models,
with the same trust/disclosure issues.

~~~
acgourley
I think building that stack that figures out who is saying positive things on
twitter about brands is probably valuable in itself. You can resell the
results to whomever.

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gojomo
Last summer, I was curious about how Mechanical Turk worked, and signed up for
some HITs. I had to classify the sentiment of tweets -- mostly about
airlines/airports/travel-in-progress. I suspect I was helping train an
automatic classifier. So work on such stacks is certainly underway...

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GaryVaynerchuk
and here we go! This will be an interesting few weeks to see how this "clicks"

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franck
Awaiting patiently the Greasemonkey script which will get rid of those ads.

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apphacker
Queue the apps that remove tweets in your stream not from your followers. Ad-
blocking for twitter.

~~~
pistoriusp
If long yearned for a function that would "silence tweets for 60 minutes."

Sometimes I'm really just not interested in the conference you're attending
right nos; but generally I'm pretty pleased to follow you.

~~~
tlrobinson
Some Twitter clients have keyword filtering, including Tweetie for Mac.

