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Twitter Grows Up, Adds "Promoted Tweets"
CWmike writes "Twitter is finally taking off the training wheels and moving into the world where real businesses tread with the launch on Tuesday of its first advertising model, dubbed 'Promoted Tweets.' The microblogging phenom has long avoided coming up with a business plan or even talking about one. But the time has come for Twitter to figure out how to make money over the long haul. Analyst Dan Old isn't so sure that Twitter users will welcome the change. 'There will be a vocal minority of users who will hate any advertising at all,' Olds said. '[Many] users understand that it's necessary and will accept it as long as it doesn't interfere with their usage. But if the ads look like regular tweets, that could cause some serious outrage from users who feel that Twitter is attempting to deceive them.'"
Twitter is adding advertisements? Say it ain't true!
I've never heard of a dot-com company before that:
1. Starts with an ungodly amount of free money from investors
2. Becomes very, very popular, all while losing many millions of dollars
3. When the investment money invariably begins to slow down, the company tries to "monetize" a money-losing idea.
4. People hop off to the newest fad, leaving this one to languish and to be used by spammers and people from the Phillipines.
5. The company is bought by some much larger company for a ridiculous amount of money.
6. The large company can't capitalize on the earlier popularity, and the brand dies.
Yawn.
I don't respond to AC's.
I would much rather see twitter remain ad free, and charge a fair monthly fee based on number of followers and following;
The user base would drop ridiculously fast. Imagine if other social network sites charged to be used.
"Nah man, I didn't see your party on Facebook. I forgot to pay my bill on time"
Twitter isn't really based on encouraging insightful. It's based on people screaming in the dark hoping somebody does care about their dinner.
Oblivion Awaits
No, they mean that while most people don't particularly like ads, they'll accept them- as much out of passiveness and lazyness as the understanding that they're funding the site- but that a disproportionately noisy minority will whine and bitch about it, thinking that because they've enjoyed a free and adless service for so long that they're entitled to that forever, rather than being grateful that they got it for nothing for so long.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I hope the Farmvillle admins' servers are prepared. When people can't microblag their life for free, they resort to obsessive compulsive virtual farming.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
"The user base would drop ridiculously fast."
Then charging a monthly fee would be an excellent idea.
"Imagine if other social network sites charged to be used."
One can dream.
It's based on people screaming in the dark hoping somebody does care about their dinner.
"Twitter: the UDP of human conversation." -me
Trolling is a art,
Time to go to my closest Starbucks for a venti non fat latte. What a great way to round out the afternoon!
They have great snacks there, too, starting at just $1.49! you should try it!
The CB App. What's your 20?
Because historically speaking, eugenics programs haven't worked out all that well.
since you ask. kthxbye.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
The Mormons have done pretty well.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I guess I'm missing out, having never seen the point in Twitter. But I have seen a few tweets, so I have a pretty good idea of how this might be implemented...
Johnny465: I just ate a delicious pastrami sandwich! Yum! (Brought to you by Jimmy John's)
Sally92: I'm so angry, my boyfriend forgot our date and took a nap instead! (You should try No-Doze)
Joe4ever: I'm in the bathroom right now (Sponsored by Charmin)
#DeleteChrome
"Grateful" is an interesting term to use when discussing the relationship of consumer to corporation.
I should be "grateful" that something I didn't ask for has intruded in my life to the point where many of the websites I visit for news or entertainment have live twitter-fed widgets that take up space but didn't cost me anything, until now that it creates yet another ad stream.
And just how is twitter better than IRC? Besides having the advertisements that I should now be grateful for?
You are welcome on my lawn.
This doesn't really affect me as I hardly ever search Twitter. The rare exception is when I want to follow someone and don't already know their username. I also use Twitter from a client instead of my browser- and on that note, TFA mentions that they may be adding support for Promoted Tweets to appear in third-party clients in the future, which makes me unhappy. I'm only following a handful of people (mostly friends and maybe two well-known/famous people) and if I started getting ads in my tweet roster from corporations I don't care about, I'd abandon Twitter in a heartbeat.
However, although I dislike advertising, this doesn't seem so bad. Only one Promoted Tweet per page, and only in search results, it's clearly marked as an ad, and they have to meet a popularity threshold in order to stay. If all online ads were like that, I'd be less inclined to block them.
That Anonymous Coward guy is pretty annoying. Can we have the government censor him or something?
I would rather Twitter went into the offices of the CEOs of Sprint, T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon, and says "we want a third of your SMS-fee revenues; and don't raise prices. Otherwise, we'll turn off Twitter."
Those guys would shit their pants and break a nail grabbing for the checkbook.
Grateful has nothing to do with it. If you offer a free service that I like (this SO does not apply to twitter, but speaking in general) I might use it. If you then start charging for it or bugging me in a way that in my opinion outweighs the value I get from it, then I might stop using it. Your business model is up you you but frankly I don't find it particularly ethically superior to offer a "free" service while having full intention in the back of your mind to changing the rules as soon as you got enough people hooked in, compared to just charging for it in the first place.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
It would make my day to have a vacuous twat read some marketroid tweet on live TV.
How exactly would this be different from the rest of their programming?
Just block them and/or report them as spam.
Or just use a client that disregards the ads.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
And just how is twitter better than IRC?>
It's better because a flashy dotcom startup can put themselves into the message loop for everyone on the planet, causing a single centralised point of failure for global communications, and add unwanted noise to your signal, while extracting and salting away millions of dollars in profit, making lots of business transactions less efficient in the process.
Oh, you meant better for the users? It's not at all. But they don't make the venture capital magazines, do they?
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
We'll have tools that will hide the adverts, and do our best to make them widespread.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Twitter isn't really based on encouraging insightful.
I use it as a democratic fan club. I follow celebrities I like (mythbuster guys, trek alumni, that kind of thing), web comic artists, people who are in the biz I am or who have jobs I'm working to get, and I sometimes reply, sometimes spout off random things.
But mostly, I use it like slashdot, but I get to choose the editors and the commenters. People post links, I follow them.
You can't take the sky from me...
Because historically speaking, eugenics programs haven't worked out all that well.
since you ask. kthxbye.
Why do people only ever talk about the sterilization approach to eugenics? What about the "get pretty people drunk and alone in the dark" approach? That's eugenics too, but it's sexy instead of being nasty.
Won't somebody please think of the sweaty aryans?
You can't take the sky from me...
i wrote a daemonized twitterbot in Ruby a couple of weeks ago to scan posts for key words and respond to relevant ones with "that's what she said"... sort of on the same lines, I guess.
Best quote ever. Can I follow your posts?