Twitter has been testing in-stream promoted tweets through Hootsuite for a a while now, but it appears the rest of the twitterverse is about to start seeing them too as the Twitter head of monetisation Adam Bain has been pushing the product during this weeks Canne Lion Awards.
After the backlash Twitter got after introducing the “#dickbar” a few months ago, they will be concerned as to how the community will react to this change, but it has been coming since Biz Stone outlined the plan over a year ago. Moreover, Twitter has been at pains to point out that the promoted tweets will be relevant to the user either from brands they follow or “relevant” based on who they follow. However, from seeing the promoted tweets on Hootsuite this is not always the case, and some geotargeting wouldn’t go amiss either.
That said, everybody understands that Twitter needs a revenue stream to live up to that $7 billion current valuation (tech bubble or no), and in stream advertising was always going to be a part of that with the broad ecosystem of twitter clients. Advertisers are also queueing up to get their message in front of Twitter’s 300 million strong engaged userbase, meaning that promoted tweets are currently going for $120,000 per day.
Whilst these ads are still relatively rare (I only see a handful per day on Hootsuite) I don’t begrudge Twitter generating some revenue, but if they become more frequent I for one hope that Twitter will give users the option of switching them off for a small fee. I appreciate that it is the power-users and taste-makers that are the most valuable to advertisers – but Twitter should not alienate these sources of information, and selling an ad-free service alongside analytics may be one way to maintain their support and continued use.
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