Pitter Patter …can you hear the sound, faint but sure? It’s the sound of likely arrival of ads to the microblogging site Twitter. According to a Financial Times report the commercialization of Twitter is going to mean ad tweets appearing in users’ timelines.
As per the report, “According to people familiar with the situation, Twitter’s plans under consideration would see ‘promoted tweets’ appear in their main timeline, the main focus of the Twitter website. Twitter had tested such ads with a third-party mobile client, HootSuite. Users could also see tweets from a brand they follow appear high up in their stream even though they were posted hours previously.”
If you remember the brouhaha created by the site’s installation of ‘Quick Bar’ to timelines viewed via its iOS apps, you can imagine the ruckus this one’s going to cause.
Yet, looking at it from Twitter’s point of view which has more than 300 million users, significant costs for hardware, coding and maintenance the decision does not seem to be foolhardy. They have hired a revenue team and the team’s job is to bring in money. And what better way than to bring in advertisers?
A techlandtime report cautions, “Though advertisers will be drooling at the thought of all those lovely, juicy eyeballs, they need to be careful. Eyeballs ain’t what they used to be, and social networks are two a penny. If ads appear in the timeline, and some unheard of startup pops out of nowhere promising it will be “like Twitter but without the ads”, who’d want to bet that there wouldn’t be a massive exodus? It’s happened before. MySpace used to matter. Altavista used to be many people’s starting point for web searches.” The operative word here is ‘used to be’!