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April 22, 2008

Twitter! Japan! Ads!

Michael Arrington

24 comments »

Twitter Japan launched today at Twitter.jp via a partnership between Twitter and Digital Garage. It’s basically Twitter, in Japanese, with display ads.

A sizable Japanese userbase has grown up around Twitter, despite the fact that it is only available in English. So this certainly makes sense. I’d expect support for other languages to follow shortly as well.

And since Twitter is now a utility, there’s no need to bother making it stable before embarking on a glorious expansion crusdade. Congrats to the Twitter and Digital Garage Teams.

See CNET for more.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 at 11:00 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Comments

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  1. Loic

    April 23rd, 2008 at 12:20 am

  2. Steven Finch

    April 23rd, 2008 at 1:07 am

    This is very interesting. I can see Twitter testing this service in Japan so they can use it on their dot.com property. I think display ads are the simplist way for Twitter to make money and probably the most unobtrusive. I would have liked to see the ad as a 300 x 250 at the bottom of the page though.

  3. yongfook

    April 23rd, 2008 at 1:12 am

    hmm twitter.jp seems to forward you back to twitter.com, even if you’re in Japan (where I am now).

    borked?

  4. Michael Arrington

    April 23rd, 2008 at 1:21 am

    yongfook - change the language preference to japanese in the drop down on the top right.

  5. Saran

    April 23rd, 2008 at 1:26 am

    Congratulations twitter.. Its about time for twitter to make some money !

  6. Stef

    April 23rd, 2008 at 1:27 am

    Just a quick point - if someone has that lock icon next to their tweet doesn’t it mean that they don’t want their tweets shared? Maybe you should blur out a few of them in your screengrab?

  7. interesting

    April 23rd, 2008 at 1:35 am

    Japanese site & ads! WOW!

    Is on-line ads something new in Japan? I wonder if Google is also thinking about on-line ads!

    (Sorry, still don’t understand what’s the big hype around Twitter)

  8. Akky

    April 23rd, 2008 at 1:42 am

    The point is that twitter is using its Japanese users (20% of all) and market as a guinea pig for ads, i.e. their business model.

    Iif this work, sure that will be added to original English twitter.

  9. 113.com

    April 23rd, 2008 at 1:55 am

    Hurrah, the business model… ;-)

  10. Marcin Grodzicki

    April 23rd, 2008 at 2:26 am

    I wouldn’t say this is really spectacular - rather strange they did it so late. With API and meshing they’ll have to introduce something more refined to have a stable business model though. Maybe feed ads, like feedburner’s.

  11. Jesús

    April 23rd, 2008 at 5:33 am

    looks like twitter will be launched in spanish soon, now I can read ‘20 minutos ago’…

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