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.

  • Sphere It

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

  1. Twitter Now In Japan
  2. Twitter en japonés
  3. Twitter updates: Japanese launch, possibly privacy invasions | money news blog
  4. TechCrunch Japanese アーカイブ » Twitter!日本!広告!
  5. RealityCrunch - TWITTER WATCH 2008!!
  6. John Jones
  7. Four (or Five!) Reasons Why » …Twitter Is The Next Google, But Better
  8. TechCrunch en français » Twitter veut plus d'essence dans son moteur
  9. TechCrunch en français » Combien vaut vraiment Twitter?
  10. » 誠好物-twitter週邊服務 20+ | atdesign
  11. socialinnovation3.com
  12. rein:MEOW - 誠好物-twitter週邊服務 20+
  13. Combien vaut vraiment Twitter?

Comments

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  1. Loic
  2. Steven Finch

    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

    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

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

  5. Saran

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

  6. Stef

    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

    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

    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

    Hurrah, the business model… ;-)

  10. Marcin Grodzicki

    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

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

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