News broke last night around the imminent launch of advertisements on the Twitter platform. Phase 1 would be including such ads within search results, phase 2 into your Twitter feed.
The ads themselves would comprise of “sponsored tweets”. They’ll sit happily in your timeline, nestled between your followers tweets, and will most likely be very relevant to what you’re talking about, or what you and your followers are generally talking about.
Think of it in the same way that Digg implemented it’s sponsored content, sitting neatly between other popular articles:
Digg Sponsored Links
This raises alot of interesting questions around how this will be implemented not only across twitter.com, but outwards to third party client applications.
Twitter Site
I think the biggest shock for users of Twitter’s site and services will be the fact that this isn’t any run of the mill ad implementation, no banner ads etc that they can happily filter out with some third party browser add on.
These ads will sit within your timeline, as if a person you follow tweeted, or retweeted it. So, it’s not only an invasion of your interface, but it’s an invasion of your timeline! This goes beyond what some people expected, and may kick up a bit of a fuss in the user community – we’ll have to see…
In addition, it’ll be tough for ad blocking software to try and work on filtering these out. The content is likely to be very contextual with the rest of your timeline, with no real 100% way to identify, and therefore filter out tweet adverts.
There is also no understanding yet on how often such adverts would appear in your timeline. Would it be 1 in every 20 tweets for example? Would they change if you refreshed the page on your timeline? My gut feeling is once a sponsored tweet is committed to your timeline, it’s there to stay.
Twitter API
So if ads start to appear in your timeline, that surely means that they’ll be being served as part of the API feeds that are already open to thousands of third party Twitter clients. I can’t see how this will not be the case – it makes complete sense for Twitter as they freely admit, twitter.com is not where most people consume their Twitter content.
Therefore they needed a way to generate revenue from advertisements, but also to get to the majority of their audience – hello timeline, and hello API.
The impact of this change technically is very minimal-to-none for a third party developer. It’ll just be another tweet in the timeline sent by the API which the client will show with others. What will be interesting though, is if developers are able to somehow identify sponsored tweets, and filter them out of the timeline feeds? This would be a huge lose for Twitter, and right now they are powerless to stop it.
Twitter API Terms of Use
I expect some kind of “Terms of Use” will soon apply to a developers API usage on their OAuth stream. It’ll likely say something like:
“In order to use the Twitter API and services, you must not filter out, manipulate or remove any tweets sent as part of timeline API call”
In legal mumbo jumbo obviously, but you get the idea. Effectively restricting developers from messing with their advertisements, and ensuring they get their ads in front of eyes, and earning some $$$.
Think about it, they’ll have to guarentee this as they’ll be selling this prime real estate on to purchasers – and they obviously want to ensure that their ads get the eyes they deserve!
So, what we’ll end up here with is instead of charging third party developers to use the API in the future, they effectively start being less flexible with it’s usage, forcing developers down a path they may not want to tread. Gone will be the days of freedom that third party developers currently enjoy, as Twitter will rely on you more than anyone to help them generate cash.
Tweetie Aquisition
This introduction of advertisements also sits quite well with Twitter’s wish to own and dominate the market for apps. With the launch of the official Twitter app for Blackberry, and the imminent launch of “Twitter for iPhone” aka Tweetie 2, Twitter will already have a massive market share on client apps. A share of the market of apps that they control, and can ensure their ad strategy plays out as well as it can.
This now makes more sense: Market-share in apps + twitter.com = Guarenteed $$$.
Developer cut?
What would really surprise me would be if Twitter try and sweeten the deal by giving developers a cut of the earnings on ads within their clients – much like Apple will be giving developers a cut of their iAd earnings in their applications.
It sure might be one way to keep those (currently very pissed) third party developers happy or happier at least.
