
Twitter Will Show Who Pays for Ads and How Much They Spend - champagnepapi
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-28/twitter-will-show-who-pays-for-ads-and-how-much-they-spend
======
martin1975
I dislike both Twitter & Facebook, and am on the verge of closing both
accounts, however I give them kudos for this - increasing transparency instead
of censorship. While I understand our desire and pursuit for truth, I would
like to leave the interpretation of any ultimate truths and meaning to rest
with the end user, and not with any corporation or even government.

~~~
akerro
This is about financial transparency, nothing blocks them from increasing
censorship and shadow-banning accounts and advertisers.

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AndrewDucker
What I'd like is a "Twitter made $x from you in the last year through showing
you ads. Click here to pay us $2x and not see any for the next year."

~~~
matt4077
It's been tried. Most directly by Google, but almost any publisher on the
internet has tested various forms of subscription model.

While some high-quality publications (the New York Times, Economist, etc.)
have seen some success in recent years, the overwhelming evidence is that the
economics just don't work out among the general public.

Most people also underestimate the costs. IIRC, Google needs about $100/pa to
supplant advertising revenue.

Yes, you may be willing to pay, so why aren't more services willing to take
your money? Apart from the administrative hassle of such a program, the $100
(or whatever) are also an average. People willing to pay as much for an ad-
free experience just happen to be at the top end of the value distribution for
advertisers as well.

In other words: If you're willing to give me 2bucks, it's gonna cost you 5!

~~~
throwaway76543
Google is currently selling this service for youtube, branded "youtube red."
It costs $10/mo and as part of that they also offer to repair some of the
crippleware in the youtube app.

It doesn't seem worth it, to me. I need ad blockers anyway for other ad
services and annoyances so I end up just avoiding their built-in ad-riddled
apps and going through a browser for things like youtube. It's a poor
experience but better than dealing with ads.

I understand the value prop for shipping crippleware apps in a low cost
android phone, but they ship the same stuff on flagship $1k phones like the
pixel. It's a bizarre choice.

~~~
Reedx
I've been paying for YouTube Red (now Premium) ever since they started it.
It's very much worth it. Between Netflix and Youtube you can replace cable.

It's frustrating how people complain about ad supported models while at the
same time aren't willing to pay for it. So much entitlement. There's also the
option of not consuming their resources.

~~~
throwaway76543
I already don't have cable, there's nothing to replace. I don't use youtube
very often and if Google wants to paywall youtube entirely that's fine by me.
Don't disingenuously introduce some silly entitlement canard - I never made a
suggestion of entitlement.

What I did point out is that they're making a mockery out of their premium
phone brand by shipping it with crippleware. Check back and see what that
decision costs them in a decade.

Google is absurdly bad at product.

------
Aissen
Considering that right now Twitter has a link to give you the reason you're
seeing an ad, that almost always doesn't give the answer. Are they afraid to
show what they've deducted of my profile directly ? I don't care how much an
advertiser spend, but I want to know who they wanted to target, or at least
what they decided to target that led Twitter to show me the ad. We're not
there yet.

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isostatic
I'd love to see a "how much did you loading this page make the site owner"

Perhaps a "with adblocker" and "without adblocker"

The average facebook account nets them something like $2 a month in the US, or
under a dollar a month in europe, that's a tiny amount.

When people realise how little their personal data and time is being sold for,
perhaps there will be more of a backlash against advertising.

~~~
Aissen
I think Facebook's monthly ARPU is closer to $7 in the US in 2017, which is
absurdly high (vs the rest of the world). Source:
[https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/31/facebook-
earnings-q4-2017-ar...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/31/facebook-
earnings-q4-2017-arpu.html)

~~~
isostatic
Ahh yes, the figures I saw were the same $26, but implied it was yearly rather
than quarterly.

I wonder why USians are so much more valuable to advertisers than Europeans.

~~~
AngryData
Probably because (and this is personal opinion, not researched facts) the US
is in a huge advertising bubble. We have found out just how effective
advertising is at selling products and we have numbers to back it up so and
decent sized business is throwing money to advertisers like mad to drive
sales. If sales start to drop though, they double down and throw more money
for more advertising; but what they top level administrators aren't
considering is the non-linear nature of advertising and exposure and
eventually advertisee fatigue enough. By time the sales numbers come back for
your second or third round you already paid for the advertising and just
burned through tons of your initial profits for minor gains. At the end of it
all though you likely still have positive overall numbers from advertising,
they don't show how badly advertising performed per cost near the end because
the big initial exposure brings up the average. Rinse and repeat!

Also, there aren't much of any protections for consumers against false and
deceptive advertising unless you have a million dollar legal team to take on
the business's multi-million dollar legal team.

~~~
isostatic
I do wonder who is paying that $7. Is is companies trying to get you to buy
their product (that you need) rather than a competitor. Is it companies
selling you tat you don't need. Is it companies trying to scam you. Is it
companies trying to get your vote?

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ythn
Won't this just lead to "laundering" platforms like what happened with Whois?

~~~
avree
Not necessarily. Twitter has the power to deny anyone they want from
purchasing ads from them. WHOIS is not centrally controlled in the same way.
Twitter could easily block "laundering" platforms from functioning simply by
not allowing them to purchase advertisements.

~~~
notatoad
The laundering will work the opposite way. Instead of hiding behind one big
entity, political advertiser's will hide behind a multitude of smaller
entities to make themselves look like grassroots organizations.

You won't see "promoted by [Koch|Soros], who spent $8.5m on ads this year",
you'll see things promoted by "milualkee citizens for freedom, who spent $1500
this year". But the money will be coming from the same place.

If you give advertisers more space, they'll figure out a way to use it
effectively. Even if the point of that space was to try and keep them honest.

~~~
s73v3r_
Right, but those groups also have to disclose their donors.

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Pinkertron
This is going to make blocking promoted tweets even more fun than it already
is.

~~~
amelius
You mean easier, yes.

~~~
Pinkertron
I block everything promoted and it never stops feeling good.

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tonyedgecombe
I wonder how much of their business is political advertising, if it was small
enough I'd be inclined to ban it all and save a lot of hassle.

~~~
jelevoir
I would imagine quite a bit these days, considering in 2014 they released this
handbook:

[https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/a/2014/the-all-
new-t...](https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/a/2014/the-all-new-twitter-
government-and-elections-handbook.html)

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stevehawk
This is possibly a bad move business wise as it possibly exposes business
intelligence information that a company may not want competitors to have.

~~~
koolba
I thought that as well but closer reading of the article indicates it’s
specifically for political advertisements, not generic ad spend by
corporations.

~~~
apoorv20
It seems that we will be able to see all the ads related to an advertiser
account. [1]

[1]
[https://ads.twitter.com/transparency](https://ads.twitter.com/transparency)

~~~
AznHisoka
I went to twitter.com/spotify, where is the link to see all their ads? Am I
missing something?

~~~
olex
Go to
[https://ads.twitter.com/transparency/Spotify](https://ads.twitter.com/transparency/Spotify).

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ghostbrainalpha
This is going to give away a huge competitive advantage for good marketers.

If I know my political ads are most effective with Women, 45-65, who are
Hispanic, and that's where I'm focusing my spend....

Is it fair for the opponent to have that information? If they give that level
of detail for political ads, I hope they at least spare startup businesses who
are still researching to find their ideal audience.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _Is it fair for the opponent to have that information?_

I'm parsing "fair" in the form of: imagine two societies, one where such
information is private the other where it's public. Who outperforms?

Would the number of start-ups which cave because an incumbent snipes their
marketing outweigh the number who could piggyback on an incumbent's revealed
slicing? (The latter, by marketing to the same customers better or noticing
who is being left out.) Will consumers see more advertising or less? If more,
will they respond to the deluge by defaulting to the incumbent or trying new
options more frequently?

I don't know. But we have an opportunity to find out. If this drives
innovation, I'd say a case is to be made to open up these data across
advertising platforms. Who knows. Maybe it's the tool to pry apart Facebook
and Google's stranglehold.

~~~
rock_hard
You realize though that at least a Facebook has the same features, right?

In fact FB went much farther in that for example they let you go back 7 YEARS
in a pages ad history and not just 7 days like Twitter does

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _FB went much farther in that for example they let you go back 7 YEARS in a
> pages ad history_

I am not completely familiar with Facebook's ad platform. Does it really let
anyone see, for example, which demographics Procter & Gamble is targeting with
a particular Gilette ad? (Or its Gilette brand, generally?)

~~~
rock_hard
Yep it does. They tell you exactly why you are seeing a ad.

For political ads you can also go to a page and look up all the ad campaigns
they are running, how much money was spend, who was target, what the ad
creative was, etc

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _They tell you exactly why you are seeing a ad_

Pardon me, I meant that anyone should be able to see who anyone else is
targeting. Currently, when Terrible Kale Bar® shows me an ad, I can see it's
because I liked a post of my Portland friend's. But I can't look at Terrible
Kale Bar®'s page and see a list of whom they're targeting.

------
maym86
This is smart. It can help move the responsibility away from Twitter's issues
with policing it's own platform and onto the people paying for the
advertising. Without transparency the blame stops at the platform. With this
people can scrutinize the actual content and sources of the content.

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alphabettsy
Thumbs up from me! This is the kind of transparency I like to see when it
comes to politics.

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avivo
This and Facebook's equivalent are great. But what about Google/YouTube...?

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tommywiseausmom
Yes, this should be a requirement for all ad platforms.

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at-fates-hands
The funny part about this is when I do see ads from companies like Apple,
Google, or other news sources, the comments thread is like pure gold.

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moomin
Unless they’re publishing KYC data, I call bullshit.

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bobbygoodlatte
I hope this sounds the alarm on how shockingly cheap it is to promote
political extremism on these platforms. Donald Trump saw much cheaper
effective ad rates than Clinton on social media by crafting viral outrage
memes as ads.

It will be interesting to look at the effective CPM rates of various
candidates on Twitter using this data. I'm hoping they don't just show how
many people were shown the Tweet as an ad, but also those who saw it from
organic distribution via retweet.

I think you'll find that outrageous, incendiary politicians pay a lot less per
view than reasonable ones.

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largehotcoffee
The amount of blatant paid advertising going unmarked in Twitter Moments is
ridiculous.

~~~
dvtrn
I assumed they were all paid for to begin with honestly.

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trophycase
This is an awesome step in the right direction.

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txsh
This only applies to overt ads which are hardly the problem. It does nothing
to mitigate the armies of astroturfers influencing public opinion.

~~~
larkeith
Still, it's certainly a welcome change, and a step in the right direction.

I wonder what the best way to combat large-scale astroturfing on a platform
like twitter would be; My first thought would be a rep system akin to those of
StackOverflow or HN, but I'm not sure how you would implement it such that
there's not a large impact on legitimate new users - there's no system like
upvotes Twitter could use to stratify.

~~~
geofft
I believe Reddit does have a problem with advertisers purchasing (or renting)
accounts from established users who have enough karma/longevity to post in the
various subreddits that block new users to avoid spam.

~~~
zitterbewegung
I think that is still an ongoing problem but you can use reddit sort of like a
company forum where you don't have to pay reddit a dime by having a community
manager and learning the platform.

~~~
isostatic
> where you don't have to pay reddit a dime

So you, and your company's data, are the product that reddit monetizes.

