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Twitter Sells "Trending Topics" To Advertisers
destinyland writes "Twitter's 'Promoted Tweets' platform already allows advertisers to insert ads directly into its users' Twitter feeds. But advertisers will soon also be able to purchase spaces in the 'Trending Topics' area of Twitter. The space reserved for tracking topics seeing the most discussion will be sold for 'thousands of dollars a day,' according to advertisers who've been approached by Twitter, and while it could be a real cash cow for the service, some users argue that Twitter 'risks ruining the site if it lets the pursuit of profit interfere with the organic nature of the social network.'"
(insert giant sucking sound here)
My debut novel AMITY now available: http://jeremydbrooks.c
I would think that Twitter going away because they can't pay their bills anymore and the VC funds drying up might ruin the site a bit more. Nothing stays free forever.
Everything you know is wrong, Just forget the words and sing along.
So now the people can game the system and get advertisers to spend money on completely stupid topics!
They have to turn a profit. Look at how over-run youtube has become. It's pretty annoying, but they did it gradually which helped silent the complaints.
Twitter will do the same. Slowly but surely making it lamer than it already is. Look at its profit forecasts (from wikipedia):
"Some of Twitter's documents covering revenue and user growth were published on TechCrunch after they were retrieved by the hacker, Croll Hacker. These contained internal projections that in 2009 they would have revenues of $400,000 in the third quarter (Q3) and $4 million in the fourth quarter (Q4) along with 25 million users at the end of the year. The projections for the end of 2013 were $1.54 billion in revenue, $111 million in net earnings, and 1 billion users.[1] No information about how Twitter plans to achieve those numbers has been published. Biz Stone published a blog post suggesting legal action for revealing the details was a possibility.[28]"\
I don't see how they can ever reach such high estimates no matter what they do. But they will certainly try.
Careful What You Wish For....
Okay poop is coming out now
This already has been happening in other areas. Many news sites sell information on trending stories.
The old joke goes, "What do you call a bus full of lawyers that runs off a bridge and drowns everyone in it? A good start."
Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn could all disappear from the face of the earth and many of us would hardly notice. Pandering to young exhibitionists may be a good business model, sort of like feeding tripe over the airwaves, cable or satellite to television receivers is a good business model, but it certainly has not done much for humanity except generate more tripe over about the ever more invasive privacy violations of these sites. A pox upon them all, and good riddance.
This is a good thing for all concerned.
... that the advertisements also are limited to 140 signs!
They also risk ruining the site if they go out of business because they couldn't find a way to make money.
Nothing is going to happen. People are going to happily continue tweeting. They might notice the ads, say "Oh, look at that", and continue on their merry way. If facebook's privacy problems don't discourage users, this definitely won't.
Raters gon' rate.
It seems like the tech behind twitter ain't that hard to emulate. Is it time to revisit the idea of decentralizing Twitter? With a migration path to make commercial Twitter itself one of several interconnected-nodes in a larger (trust-based?) 140-char microblogging network?
what Wikipedia does.
some users argue that Twitter 'risks ruining the site if it lets the pursuit of profit interfere with the organic nature of the social network.'
Twitter risks running out of money if it lets the organic nature of the social network interfere with the pursuit of profit. Then how will you tell your friends what color your last bowel movement was? You're Facebook friends with Grandma now, do you think she wants to read that? Wait, old people do talk about that stuff. Carry on.
The Internet has always had the reputation of being "free", when it never has been. In the past it was supported by academic and government (military) sources whose realized value in the either the free flow of information and/or an uninterpretable flow of information. It has since moved on to be maintained by businesses that what want to generate revenue from supporting it. There's nothing inherently evil in this, they provide a service and you pay for it one way or another. It used to be in taxes, tuition, etc... now it's in subscriptions, advertising hits, etc. The problem is the myth that the internet is "free" is still very much ingrained and people will use all sorts of sites and provide a ridiculous amount of information without ever stopping to thing that these sites are (generally) not run out of charity and will extract their pound of flesh in some manner.
This may be a first in that ads may carry more 'content'
than the user contributions.
How about making good products, so users will advertise it anyway by word of mouth?
If they're going to sell ads, why not sell ads that look like ads? Why do they have to mess around with insinuating them into the service?
I mean, I pay nothing to post on Twitter. Put an ad in the corner. I promise not to run away.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
I'll just post my twits here.
Here's my first one: "Um. Well. I don't really know what to say, here. Ah, just, ah. I guess that's it."
I hope I didn't go over the limit. Did everyone read that? Check back soon for more.
Also, check out my cool pages on MyFace and SpaceBook.
As the following blog post http://steve.grc.com/2010/05/24/facebook-and-the-ford-pinto/ points out:
Ditto for Twitter.
Twitter has been manipulating their trending topics for a while now. In the past they've added big live events like sports contests to their trending topics when, in my analysis, those topics simply weren't trending. How do I know? I spent some time trying to build a long-term trending topics list using the public_timeline feeds. There were obvious items there that were underrepresented in the actual tweets. They should label these "sponsored topics" as such.
I mean, among those who do care for Twitter.
As I understand it, it the ads will only be on the web site or on certain subscription only channels.
Who on earth uses Twitter's web site to use Twitter's data? It's quite possibly the worst interface to the service that exists. Maybe 10% of the users I follow ever post from web.
And if you want to subscribe to the all ad channel, then .. well, you're using Twitter in the way that all the microblogging haters love to make fun of, and frankly, you're doing it wrong.
uses twitter.
As your monopoly service provider with very low data limit caps, I plan on profiting very handsomely, by making you pay to receive lots and lots of ads..
Todos mis movimientos están friamente calculados
Sell Twitter to Google. They'll know how to generate revenue.
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga
Twitter's 'Promoted Tweets' platform already allows advertisers to insert ads directly into its users' Twitter feeds.
No it does not.
As detailed here, promoted tweets are NOT displayed in user's feeds at all, but only in search results currently.
They do go on to explain they will review feedback, and potentially expand them, keeping the option open to include them in users' feeds, specifically if there's value in doing so.
I search and use the service daily, and have yet to receive a single ad.
I think the users will just ignore the ads just like everyone does at facebook. Unless some ad of their interest POPS out! All in all, great news for twitter and the advertisers to gain more and more profit! Thanks.
youtube doenst make a profit.. who ever said that is dead wrong