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.'"

Comments

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[skuzzlebutt]

(insert giant sucking sound here)

Re:twitter

[MichaelSmith]

Okay poop is coming out now

Quoting penny arcade is trolling now?

Re:Well duh...sooner or later

[owlnation]

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.

I'm surprised there's not been considerably much more outrage at Youtube actually. I find the Youtube site to be no longer usable. (In fact, it is actually completely impossible to use it with adblock and firefox -- does this mean I whitelist it? No, it means I use another video site.) While I understand that Google needs to raise revenue from youtube, the way they've done it does suggest they've lost sight of their users. It's like with the very huge public disaster that was the bing-style images on their homepage. Their entire success is built on the fact that the home page was minimal and their ads were contextual and non-intrusive. That formula made them billions -- now they're beginning to lose their way.

Twitter is different. It always has had a massive noise to signal ratio -- adding more noise in the way of advertising probably won't affect anyone much. It's core userbase has the attention span of a goldfish, they probably won't even notice the ads. Twitter was doomed from the second it launched -- it was always only a question of when, not if, it ceased to be the "next big thing". It's already peaked.