Twitter and Ads

Okay…it’s finally happening.  Twitter is going to start slowly rolling out ads today in its Search.  They have plans to roll them into people’s tweets over time depending on the response from users of the site.  Since its inception, people have been wondering how Twitter (and most social media zeitgeist sites) will be raking in the revenue.  Ads were always understood as the solution, but its taken four years to begin.  And now the question is – what will the users do?  Will they go elsewhere?  Tune out?

Check out this article from AdAge Twitter Has A Business Model: ”Promoted Tweets”.  Key paragraph for me is this: ”No rush for revenue: That said, Mr. Costolo cautioned that quick profitability is not the goal, and that the ads would be rolled out slowly to see how users react to them. “We are not in a rush to make a certain amount of money this year,” said Mr. Costolo, who is also, incidentally, one of Twitter’s earliest investors. “We want to get this right. We don’t want to force a model on people that is based on incorrect hypotheses.”

* I find the below video from 2008 helpful if you just don’t get Twitter’s social media relevance.  I have my own opinions about Twitter as a valuable asset in a client’s social media strategy – I’ll write about those soon.