Twitter unveiled ‘Promoted Tweets’ at their Chirp event, and the system is now live for some big brands. As part of their monetisation strategy, brands can now pay to have Twitter messages appear permanently at the top of search returns for terms. For instance, search for Starbucks on Twitter, and you get:
That’s seems fine to me, and the fact that it’s an advertising system based around search has brought many comparisons to Google’s search advertising.
Later on, Twitter plan to introduce relevant Promoted Tweets into user streams by targetting relevant keywords from recent messages, with those scoring high on ‘resonance’ sticking sticking around, and those low scoring tweets disapearing. And the initial CPM pricing will give way to a resonance-based price structure. Resonance will include reuse of a hashtag, clicks on an avatar, clicks on a shortened link, retweets, favourites, and the influence of a retweeter amongst other factors.
Here’s a handy video guide:
Again, keyword targetting isn’t new. And Digg has experimented with in-system advertising based on people liking the advertising content or not.
And third-party developers have the choice of displaying promoted tweets to get a share of the revenue, or disabling them in their client (perhaps to justify a paid download).
The only people that don’t get a share of the new revenue?
You.
Twitter users won’t have any way to make any revenue from Promoted Tweets appearing in their streams or searches. Which is different to existing in-stream advertising such as Magpie, or Ad.ly. The money from those third-parties is split between the platform and the sponsored Twitter user who publishes the sponsored message.
Not only are brands likely to go with Twitter’s own Promoted Tweets due to the publicity and bigger opportunity for relevant eyeballs in search and keyword targetting, but when users get hit by those adverts, they’re likely to be even less tolerant of additional sponsored messages sharing revenue with users themselves, which means the likes of Magpie and Ad.ly might run out of users willing to sell access to their Twitter stream.
That’s a shame for users in my opinion. While many might not agree with selling the chance for sponsored tweets, I’m of the opinion that it’s down to the creator of that content to decide how and why they might want to monetise it and to live with the consequences. I’ve certainly used Magpie beyond testing as it made me enough revenue to cover my hosting costs for my blogs without annoying many of my followers. And the ratio was about 1 sponsored tweet in a few hundred of my normal efforts.
The question is whether Twitter really is a social network in the Facebook vein, where all revenue goes to the platform and developers, or whether the fact it’s based so much on the content provided by users should make it more of a publishing platform like Blogger, WordPress, Posterous etc, which means it’s notable by not providing the Google Adsense for content creators to match the Twitter version of Adwords.
