San Francisco
– Following months of speculation, microblogging service Twitter on Tuesday rolled out
an advertising platform, which it is calling "Promoted Tweets." The
company, which has drawn scrutiny over the years for its lack of a revenue
model, is launching the new program with ad partners that include Best Buy,
Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks and Virgin America.
"Promoted
Tweets are ordinary Tweets that businesses and organizations want to highlight
to a wider group of users," wrote company founder Biz Stone on Twitter’s
blog.
He said that the ads "will be clearly labeled as ‘promoted’ when an
advertiser is paying, but in every other respect they will first exist as
regular Tweets and will be organically sent to the timelines of those who
follow a brand."
The company said that it plans to see how the initial ads
resonate with users before expanding the program.
Stone wrote that if users
don’t interact with a particular Promoted Tweet — by replying to it,
favoriting it or retweeting it — the ad will be removed.
Related Links:
http://blog.twitter.com/2010/04/hello-world.html
http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/13/promoted-tweets-not-resonating-twitter
If this whole initiative depends on people retweeting promoted tweets, I find it very unlikely that some of the tweet-ads will become so popular to stay long enough on top of the timeline. The whole success depends on whether Twitter will keep the paid-for-tweets ONLY in the personal timelines of people who follow the advertisers.