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.'"

Comments

Predictable

[DogDude]

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.

Re:Predictable

[calmofthestorm]

7) Many different imitators crop up, each trying to capture the former userbase, and the circle of life continues.

Re:Predictable

[jo42]

Most of the business plans I've seen in the last few years go something like that.

1) Do something for free on the Internet.
2) Get lots of people using it, lots of 'eye balls'.
3) Sell to Google (or some other fool with deep pockets).

Re:freemium

[physicsmichael]

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"

Re:freemium

[grub]

It's based on people screaming in the dark hoping somebody does care about their dinner.

"Twitter: the UDP of human conversation." -me

Hmm

[Andorin]

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.