Twitter, the subject of endless business model speculation, added another weapon to the arsenal today – house advertisements on the home page when you’re logged in, and some search results.
The advertisements currently only link internally to Twitter Search or the Twitter Widget. But it isn’t much of a stretch to assume they’re testing the units for possible third party advertisements in the future. Twitter Japan, which launched a year ago, has included display ads from the beginning.
Last summer Twitter CEO Evan Williams said he thought Twitter’s strongest revenue potential would come from charging for commercial use by brands. But it’s clear that the company will experiment with a number of different potential streams – we think Twitter search has tremendous revenue opportunity.
1st
this is unfair,ruslan
ooonnaann,
its my place,Grrrr, growl
Can’t they think of something more original to do.
watch the lawsuits FLY if they dare to target text ads to search queries.
why? unless you’re talking about trademark stuff, I don’t see any litigation issues. Google and everyone else has done this for nearly a decade now.
Google was sued for patent infringement by Overture/Yahoo!.
But they were sued for their bid-for-placement algorithm. Since Google finally pay a lot for that, I think Twitter like the others who are using such advertising system are careful and can find ways to play relatively safely.
Overture, now controlled by Yahoo, has patented nearly everything relating to placement of text ads on a search results page. If you recall they sued Google (and settled) just before Google’s IPO. It was a $500M settlement. They also sued FindWhat (now Miva) and also got a settlement.
Yahoo will go after them in a nanosecond. Twitter won’t know what hit them.
Here’s the patent, get to know it if you really think this is an approach for twitter:
http://www.goog...1&as_psrg=1
That’s OK. Yahoo needs the money since they’ve fallen apart in every other way.
it would be difficult to get users to click on twitter search ads. users click on search ads when the quality and presentation of the ads and the organic results are comparable. so either the ads have to be as noisy as the tweets or the tweets have to get less noisy.
the latter is unlikely since twitter is essentially CB radio for keystrokes-the value lies in the spontaneity.
Well, that is a nice tried and tested business model..At least here in India, we have quite a few good players tagging SMShes with ads like 160by2.com
But this would also require terrific investment in sales teams who will sell the ads to the different companies in different geographies of the world.
The advertisement in this model is highly localized..
weebly sites are down. 10 hours!
I think I might have a way that a “ton” of daily web traffic could very easily be essentially “set-up” to be “guaranteed” to increase web traffic daily! Which, I honestly think ought to work very well… that is, if it’s initially legally “set-up” correctly!
So, if by any chance, anyone from “twitter” is interested? Please just email me, and then of course… we can schedule an opportunity to speak by phone, soon!
I am looking for a childhood friend. This popped up. If you remember me from 2nd grade would you please write?
Amy
I really hope this is one of the potential revenue streams. I just saw it today, and its not that bad!
I hope so, and wish the best for twitter to figure out how they can monetize their biz ASAP
+1… I totally agree with you. Could be a good marketing medium and revenue stream.
I noticed it as well. It seems like Twitter is promoting his own services…
Ads will soon follow.
I don’t see why bother with cheap text ads on people’s profiles. They’ll just get a few thousand dollars a month out of those, and they will start to hate their 3rd-party developers for stealing traffic…
I think they just want to make the Twitter experience more accessible for all the new users who sign up to the growing social network.
Just a few thousand dollars a month? I’d think much more than that. They’ll have a great amount of context to help drive ad selection and with the growing user base, they could do hundreds of thousands, if not millions.
Are you kidding? Assuming that they come out with a good ad-serving system, as an individual advertiser, I would pay thousands PER DAY to be able to reach Twitter users.
Looks great, It’s perfect just the way it is. Hopefully they will only place one ad at a time, assuming thats their intention.
Odd that japan has had ads for more than a year and we haven’t though.
I noticed this today as well but never thought about it being a test for possible outside advertising.
Well, hope this works out for them.
I like these text ads, they are very clean and not annoying at all. If blended well within the homepage, this could be substantial for twitter. Looking forward to see how they develop this
http://twitter.com/cliffdailey
Michael, do you know how many Twitter search queries done a day? I think Twitter search is more like news search than general search, which may result in less ads click through.
Is it ads or just a step before changing their design? There is another linke for widgets linking to a twitter page. See here http://www.flic...nas/3360532297/
Search ads are something of a no brainer. I’d like to see them take a page from Automattic’s playbook and be selective about who sees ads keeping the click-thru quality high. They have a great opportunity to inject ads/messages into personal recommendations and create a type of word of mouth affiliate program.
Cross pollinate user databases, some datamining and tweaking should provide a unique ads to the viewer
I noticed this today as well but wasn’t sure what the purpose behind it was. Thanks for sharing this info!
Mike, hope they don’t turn it into some adisaster like TC is. Please don’t consult for them.
Do you really think highly intelligent Internet users are going to click on text ads? I think not.
And what do you think the percentage of “highly intelligent Internet users” is ?
What I’m saying is look at the demographics of the current base of users on Twitter. Most users on Twitter are intelligent Internet users that in some shape or form rely on the Internet as part of their life (web developers, A-bloggers, programmers, Internet marketers, etc.)
These are people who know their way around the web and arent going to click on text ads. They aren’t there to search for things. They are there to drive their businesses and marketing themselves.
inevitable.
Two words: This. sucks.
Next thing you know, they’ll be sending out ads through the API, so I won’t even be able to escape this kind of crap by using TweetDeck.
Twitter is attempting to gain traffic back to its site/service. With all of the third party applications, they’ve been essentially losing revenue opportunities (not that there was a biz model in place to begin with). Will be interesting to see if this works. Is it just me, or is Twitter becoming mainstream, vs. a marketer/business buzzword and tool.
You have a good point Kelly. But that problem isn’t going to go away. People are still going to use different twitter clients for communication and mobility is a large part of it.
Twitter needs to find a means to engage people on the website. Without it, this is no different than using IRC chat, only it seems its unidirectional in most cases.
Is this why the image upload feature is delayed today?
It’s about d@mn time they started trying to get some revenue.
I actually think that Twitter should just experiment with the Google search business model. Simple, and users are already used to it.
BTW, interesting that they removed Search from their home page. I have heard it was nice, but never saw it.
Anyway So far I see them clean advertising here,Hope it keep clean like this,and if there will be similar to adsense I think I will be one of the “first applicant there
Ads are only effective if the person vieing them is in a buying mindset. It’s why google is so successful.
When was the last time you were on twitter shopping for a digital camera or a pair of shoes?
I.E. Do you come to TC looking for Rackspace or a hosting company?
finally we see how twitter monetize its page .
I just noticed the ad for twitter search on my Twitter home
Even I noticed it right now. Finally Twitter has come out with the much talked about business model
Not bad approach. Twitter has to make money as well. That, combined with paid “recommend users” will surely generate some dough for them.
One small problem with ads on home page: how will you make them relevant?
Google search ads have the advantage that the user made a query for the content displayed on the page. Behind that page is the entire context and selection history of the pages that comprise the search results.
By contrast, a Twitter home page has 2800 characters to of context (unless they want to look further back into following tweet history), no link history, and no idea which of those tweets you found interesting or relevant.
They could use your status history to compute relevance, but for people like me who tweet only a few times a day, the pool of relevant topics will be small and will quickly be out of date.
Home page ads will be very similar to “spray and pray” banner ads, or the crap ads they have been displaying on Facebook.
Now ads on their search page, if it becomes widely used, may prove useful.
Twitter search has a long way to go. Here are a seven of my recent Google searches that returned accurate subsecond results on Google. Try them yourself on Twitter search. Basically useless.
savory vietnamese mtn view (no results)
yui onload event (ditto)
tb cases a year (ditto)
cto netsuite (ditto)
tesla dealership menlo park (two results, no links, no address)
truckee webcam (two results, one broken link, one that worked)
specialized fsr xc (none)
not bad for a micro blogging super site like Twitter. twitter could be the next Facebook or Google, with it strong mainstream buzz and rapid growth, the site has lot of potential. Its massive web traffic could be monetized, Twitter only problem here is implementation. This could be a gold rush for Twitter.
Is this THE revenue stream? There is a cost to sending SMS texts and my guess would be this is mainly to cover those costs. I would also guess that people who want the convenience of texted tweets will accept the trade off.
I still think Twitter’s biggest opportunity for revenue is charging for API use. It makes the most sense when 80% of Twitter users come in through it. It also hopefully means we start to see some really powerful marketing and customer service apps which we might be happy to pay for to get the real power of Twitter — instant interaction with vast numbers of people. It’s proven companies will pay for that.
Ian Hendry
CEO, WecanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz
They really should act quickly and integrate a revenue stream to fund this business.
HUGE – I wonder how they plan or targeting? Be use or by content or both?
I totally agree that this is a primer for a larger ad-related release. VC Cafe posted an update on it last night, including our thoughts on five ways Twitter has to capture the buzz value:
http://www.vcca...keting-message/
Uh, I know the king has spoken. Is this an ad test? Or just a notice to promote search?
My biggest concern with the new ads are competitive ads appearing on twitter profiles, as in this example:
http://bit.ly/aviarytwit
I imagine they’ll setup a way to filter them if something like that were to happen.
Ads aren’t likely to work on Twitter search (perhaps on any page on Twitter). As a commenter pointed out already, people aren’t searching for products or services, they’re searching for NEWS. Ads are next to irrelevant for such searches.
Also I don’t even think the search is that good with “long tail” or more detailed searches (which are essential to monetize) simply because of the 140 char limit, there’s simply not much content to search through. So basically you can get results for one or two keyword searches and that’s it since to match any “tweet” with a longer phrase is highly unlikely.
Also, a LOT of people won’t click on short URLs so this is another reason not to product search on Twitter – how to know if that link is going to take you to a site that has the product you want, or just some malware site? It amazes me why they don’t just escape URLs from the 140 char limit (easy to do programmatically).
On the Gillmor Gang last week they debated whether Amazon should buy Twitter. This makes a lot of sense. Why? Twitter faces two problems scaling and monetization. How can Amazon help?
1. Scale -
The team at Amazon Web Services could devote more resources to improving the reliability of Twitter. Twitter already uses Amazon Web Services, so the transition to a devoted team would be seamless.
2. Monetization -
Amazon could use their product catalog by using ‘tweet semantics’ to link to related products. If someone is saying they are reading a book and they mention the book they can link to Amazon with a (descriptive) Tiny URL.
A few months ago I read an post about the ’semanticising’ twitter for revenue. It’s a good read, check it out:
http://liako.bi...-revenue-model/
The problem with having sidebar advertising is that few people use twitter.com. Too many people are using third-party applications. The business model needs to be embedded in the content (tweets).
Why would Amazon need to buy Twitter for this to happen? Assuming Twitter would go for $250mm and up, Amazon wouldn’t recoup that cost so fast, if ever.
It would be better just to hammer at Twitters door with a cut-rate affiliate deal to encourate Twitter to implement something like that on Twitters’ end.
Facebook already did try something like this (in the realm of friend recommendations) and it didn’t exactly meet with wild success.
Twitter Search, in any form, may be attractive to newcomers…
Nice to know you read my blog
cool
Too bad no one uses it as an addicte anymore.
I was hoping Twitter would be brighter than to base their income on advertising.
With the way that social media is going, advertising in its traditional guise is practically dead. Just look at the big media players who can’t keep a business going – its not the net, its that advertising in its basic format doesn’t work!
I have just typed out a much better business model for them – and decided its so good, I’m going to build it myself!
It is about time that Twitter starts monetizing. They need to pay back their investors large investments.
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