Twitter Unveils Money-Making Scheme: Promoted Tweets

As you might imagine, running a website, especially a large one, is not an inexpensive endeavor. The folks in charge need to worry not only about the actual servers, but things like bandwidth, design work, et cetera. For sites like Twitter, which are mind-blowingly popular, the fact that it’s chugged along ad-free up to this point is quite a feat (made possible due to investors, who obviously are now looking for a ROI). So, where and what is Twitter’s first ad?

I truly expected to see rather typical ad placements around the site, but overall, it doesn’t seem like Twitter’s plan could be considered a big deal at all. As it appears, the small ads will appear in a similar format as regular tweet’s, but will appear at the top of any site search as for now. So for example, if you search for “techgage“, you might see a promoted ad up top. I haven’t been able to see any ads thus far, but being in Canada might have something to do with it.

Despite the ads being less intrusive than many other types of advertising, many are still up-in-arms over them. As mentioned, running a service like Twitter requires millions of dollars to operate, and given that it’s a free service, a promoted tweet doesn’t seem like a big deal. But to everyone’s defense, what seems to be made worse about the prospect is that eventually, these promoted tweets will appear in your feeds. Here’s to hoping that this isn’t going to be too abused, or annoying.

It will be interesting nonetheless to see the reaction, and also the effectiveness of the campaigns in the weeks to come. What’s most interesting about the setup is that in order for an ad to continue appearing, people have to “retweet” it. If the ad doesn’t get enough action, so to speak, it will be removed, and the advertiser will not be charged. For both the users and advertisers, this seems like a rather reasonable setup.

Both reports note that Twitter will eventually allow third party Twitter clients to integrate Promoted Tweets, with the app developer receiving a cut of the revenue. In a move that may raise the ire of Twitter users, the articles also state that Twitter plans to eventually put ads into your Twitter stream.