

Twitter Bans In-Stream Ads - percept
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitter_bans_in-stream_ads.php

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aresant
Not that it needs to be said, but this is exactly why building on top of
somebody else's platform - where policies like this are a work in progress -
can be a very bad idea . . .

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jarin
Totally true, that's why you're better off building your own Twitter or
Facebook to support your advertising efforts.

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jrockway
I know you're being sarcastic, but I like this idea a lot. Imagine a world
where the advertising companies would have to build roads if they want to put
up billboards, instead of the current world, where anyone can visually shit
all over anything, and you're just forced to look at it.

I like the precedent Twitter is setting.

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Groxx
I dunno, I don't think I like the idea of a strictly-advertising-company
owning the medium a huge amount of people communicate on. Can you _imagine_
the TOS / privacy policy? Granted, that's what Facebook appears to be
becoming... but I'm off that for good.

And I too like how Twitter is handling this. Promoted tweets seem like the
right setup for users, as you effectively have to _request_ the ad to get it,
but it's easier to find (and you know they're legit).

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hugh3
_I dunno, I don't think I like the idea of a strictly-advertising-company
owning the medium a huge amount of people communicate on._

You mean like gmail?

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Groxx
Pretty much, yes, and +1 for a good catch :)

But Google's been rather tried-and-true on issues like this (for most people's
opinions), and they were _first_ a crawler, and _second_ an advertiser, even
if they make most of their money from it now. They make that money because
they made a great product. This implies their motivations are at least
_somewhat_ removed from a "lets start an ad platform!" company.

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minouye
Does anyone know what this means for affiliate links in tweets? Are they only
going after big players like Ad.ly, or is this touching everyone?

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ptomato
I should note that this makes the Mac version of the twitter client twitter
just acquired violate their terms of service.

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aheilbut
It's not clear to me whether they are simply banning the insertion of paid
tweets via the API, or they're saying that you can't put ads (which are not
tweets) in the same area of a UI in which a timeline of tweets is being
displayed.

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swivelmaster
Scrolling quickly, I misread the title as "Twitter to Stream In-Brain Ads"

The future is now!

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jfornear
It looks to me like they are only trying to prevent third parties from
cluttering the official stream with third-party paid tweets. Not really
anything for developers to get riled up about.

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jhuckestein
This sounds worse than it is. You can share revenues with twitter on the
promoted tweets.

And I agree that displaying ads "in-stream" can be confusing. Promoted tweets
make more sense.

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johnl
Making a firm decision like this as to what the Twitter customer wants seems
like a bad idea in my opinion. I would have rather have seen Twitter create a
preference check box allowing those who want ads to have them, and set 3rd
party ad policy for Twitter to share in the revenue. Twitter is far from
having a secure source of income so killing instead of controlling early
revenue sources doesn't seem like a good idea.

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CountSessine
This is the first step in charging for this themselves. You'll be able to
advertise with Twitter - just don't think you'll be able to do it without
giving Twitter themselves a cut.

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kadavy
Banning in-stream ads right out seems a bit drastic. They could instead
develop standards for in-stream ads that prevent confusion.

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Groxx
Sucks for advertisers, but sounds like a plus for users. I like their
"promoted tweets" concept better anyway.

Go Twitter!

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korch
What is an Ad? Can I tweet that I drink Pepsi if Coke is today's official
Twitter sponsor? We all can see where this leads. No doubt Twitter doesn't
want to a become plain, old, boring ad sponsor. Like on TV. Or like Facebook.
They really should do more to create entirely new types of ads, _which most
people would not even consider as being an ad_.

