Twitter Rolling Out Ads [Four Years Later, Twitter Decides It's Time To Make Money, Rolling Out Ads Slowly To Users]

Tweet

Twitter is taking the first steps to turn its popular microblogging service into a profitable business today. They’re doing this with “Promoted Tweets” which will be very similar to Google’s “Sponsored Links” on their result pages. Twitter has been successful without ads, but can they survive getting ads?

Right now, the “Promoted Tweets” will be from advertisers. They’ll only show up in searches on Twitter.com, but the company did reveal that they may roll them out into a user’s stream of Tweets from friends. The first wave of companies signing on to be on “Promoted Tweets” include Virgin America, Best Buy and Starbucks. Starting out, only 2% to 10% of users will see the Promoted Tweets, with more and more being slowly exposed to the ads as Twitter rolls them out.

The Wall Street Journal reports that advertisers have been waiting years for Twitter to start offering ads on their site, but Twitter CEO Ev Williams and Biz Stone have been hesitant to introduce ads to the site because they’re afraid about diminishing the quality of the site. Stone said in a blog post that the company was slow to introduce ads “because we wanted to optimize for value before profit.”

To start, Twitter will have a very basic ad model, just charging advertisers for every 1000 impressions for their ads. However, they’re going to roll out another model based on user interaction. If an ad is not popular with users (based on click-through and how many people retweet the ad), then it will be removed from circulation and users won’t see it again.

Twitter has been around since 2006, and some valuations have put it’s value as high as $1 billion.

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