image courtesy netmoneyfaq.com
The long rumored addition of advertisements to Twitter is apparently imminent, with some predicting an official announcement at the upcoming SXSW conference in mid-March.
Exactly what form the ads will take is still speculation, much like the long running guessing game of how, exactly, Twitter plans to ever make any money.
More interesting to me are the implications. Facebook has managed to incorporate ads and not really disrupt the content. Much like Google, the ads are there, but not all that intrusive. It seems to me that Twitter will have a more difficult time incorporating ads in such an unobtrusive way.
If Twitter starts clogging up people’s ‘streams’ with sponsored tweets, well, I can envision scenarios that include all hell breaking loose. Especially if there is no way to opt out of them. But how else is Twitter going to effectively serve the ads? People are not going to elect to follow corporate, ad-spewing tweet bots.
Twitter could put ads along the side of their site, like Google, and they may, but too many people use third party applications to access Twitter. The third party app issue is not as prevelent for Facebook and Google as it is for Twitter, as most users still go to those actual sites to use those services. With Twitter, so many other ways of using it’s service exist, that I would bet there are many people that almost never visit Twitter.com. (If you ask me, this is why Twitter.com sits down at the bottom of the list of the top 50 busiest websites.)
In hindsight, Twitter should have equipped itself with a more robust, feature-laden homepage that would have kept most of the users attracted to the third party apps on their site to begin with, then they could have just covered the margins with ads. However, I am sure they will tell you that is not in keeping with their philosophy.
I wouldn’t think sponsored tweets are, either, so it should be interesting to see how this all plays out.
