Twitter to implement sponsored tweets
At this year’s Chirp, the official Twitter developer conference, COO Dick Costolo announced plans to implement Twitter’s “monetization engine” which will allow twitterers to pay to promote their tweets. This from CNET News:
The company insists that “promoted tweets” aren’t ads, but tweets, which in a sense is just Silicon Valley futurist-speak. But in a sense, they’re right: In choosing to promote a tweet in search, a company selects keywords and then chooses the existing tweets from its account that it wants to promote. Users can reply to them, retweet them, and add them as favorites. There will be real-time analytics attached. Businesses, more or less, are paying to push their tweets further into the Twitter universe than they would be otherwise.
Also at the Chirp Conference, Twitter Co-founder Biz Stone announced that Twitter had roughly 105 million registered users. To put that in perspective, Google AdWords, which is currently the Internet’s leading advertising service, has under 1 million clients. Albeit, only a fraction of Twitter users will pay to promote Tweets and only a fraction of Adwords accounts are actively advertising, Twitter has a much larger base. The service will almost certainly leech advertising dollars from AdWords. That’s good news for people who view AdWords as having a monopoly on the Internet advertising industry.
Will sponsored Tweets change the face of the micro-blogosphere as we know it? Will it reduce the quality of Twitter or will it open new doors? Those are the questions most Twitter fans are probably asking right now. Let you answers be heard with a comment.
Tags: advertising, micro-blogging, twitter
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I hope they dont do that. Sponsor tweets has the potential to create biased or even negative opinion among many users of twitter.
They implemented it already I think.
I also have read somewhere that they already had implemented sponsored tweets, and that it can be seen on some twitter search results page, but not on all.