“People are constantly talking and engaging with brands, sharing their feedback,” said Anamitra Banerji, head of product management and monetization at Twitter when referring to a chart displaying the number of tweets about the Super Bowl during the game, along with the number of tweets about brands and ads during the event. “What if brands start to participate? What would the chart look like then?”
After discussing this in a panel Monday about the future of interactive advertising at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting 2010, Banerji told MediaPost that Twitter is “working on an ad platform, but it’s only in the test phase.”
There are some who expect the ad platform to launch on or around March 12, which is when the South by Southwest conference will begin. Twitter rose to prominence thanks to SXSW in 2007.
The Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) recently introduced a guide to social media marketing disclosure, which requires the use of special hash tags to indicate specific types of commercial tweets: #paid for paid tweets, #samp for tweets from a blogger who received a sample and #spon for sponsored tweets.
This system is just a “workaround” for now, Banerji said.
Twitter’s pending ads will be owned and operated by the company, “much in the same way Google offers its AdSense advertising,” according to Mike Melanson at ReadWriteWeb.
Up until now, Twitter has been a bit mum about its strategy to earn revenue. Last year, co-founder Biz Stone even said that advertising just wasn’t interesting to the company.
Recently, Twitter showed that it is seeing 50 million tweets per day, which is equivalent to about 600 per second. This reflects dramatic growth from the 5,000 tweets per day back in 2007, the 300,000 tweets per day in 2008 and the 2.5 million per day at the start of 2009, and 35 million per day by the end of the year.
The appeal of taking advantage of this huge audience to make some money is clear. For advertisers, the location-based and other targeting possibilities are cherries on top of the mountainous audience they can reach through Twitter.
It seems the only threat to this venture is how open users will be to seeing prominent commercial tweets in their streams. Despite the fact that some Twitter users have said they would stop using the service if they saw ads in their streams, others seem more open to the possibility. Regardless, it seems highly unlikely that a shift in the ad landscape would turn off enough users to stop the avalanche of success that the company has seen recently.
By the end of 2010, it’s possible that Twitter will have three streams of revenue, according to Dan Frommer at Silicon Alley Insider: advertising, licensing data to search providers (i.e. Google and Bing) and pro services for corporations.
Sources:
http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=122950
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitter_ad_platform_release_imminent.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+readwriteweb+(ReadWriteWeb)&utm_content=Google+Reader
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10458191-36.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
http://blog.twitter.com/2010/02/measuring-tweets.html
http://gigaom.com/2010/02/23/twitter-to-launch-ad-platform-soon/
http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-ad-platform-launching-at-sxsw-next-month-2010-2
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