Social Media
Twitter ads?
April 1, 2009 Update: Twitter has a new UI. They moved the search box and trending topics from the top nav to the right nav.
(March 16, 2009) A few weeks ago, I saw that my Twitter top navigation had the new user interface with a drop-down menu of the different “trending” topics, as well as a search box.
Last week, while attending the SXSW conference, I saw a box on the right hand side of my Twitter “home page” that talks about “widgets.” If you click this “ad,” it takes you to twitter.com/widgets
During the SXSW GPS session, I asked Twitter’s Senior Operations Engineer John Adams (who was part of the GPS panel) if Twitter was ready to test ads the same way they had in Twitter Japan. He said “I don’t have any info on Twitter ads.”
Today (March 24) I saw a new place where Twitter is testing ads. Since I have the new UI, I can search from my Twitter home page and the “search results page” now has a “Featured User” that looks like a small text ad.
I did a few searches and saw different featured users including @nytimes who currently has 403,000 followers, @espn with 54,000 followers, @BBCClick with 272,000 followers and @Mashable with 300,000 followers.
I think this ad placement make sense. Twitter could do a better job at serving ads than Google since they know who I follow, friends that follow me, the topics that are important to me and the conversation I have.
For instance, if my friend @DamoB is searching for “Las Vegas Hotels,” Twitter could serve 3 simple ads like “Your friend @SocialJulio follows @VegasBill, here is a recent Tweet between them.” Below that, Twitter could also drop a simple text ad from a hotel who is active on Twitter, like @MarriottIntl. Smart advertisers will want to intercept this targeted traffic and participate in the conversation. Twitter can create a bidding & click rate system similar to Google’s to maximize what advertisers are willing to pay.
This is just one of the reason I feel that Microsoft will buy Twitter. They have a large wallet and finally saw a weakness in Google. More users like me search and get recommendations from our Twitter friends. Just last week I asked for recommendation on a file sharing service and I received 23 recommendations from people I trust in less than 30 minutes.
Do you think Twitter finally has a business model? Add your comments below and follow me on Twitter @SocialJulio
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And here’s the blog post at Adrants where I linked to you:
http://www.adrants.com/2009/03/twitter-rolls-out-ads-still-not-making.php
=) Cheers and thanks again! Superb ad ideas. Here’s hoping Google buys another Evan Williams project and uses that super-rich data stream to target ads based on… (insert list of factors here)
Nice post here Julio.
What is happening is Twitter is becoming the synaptic network for the human cyborg.
I agree with your observation about human filter types of ads. Who said what that is connected to whom creates a lot of semantics to mine for ad serving.
I can also imagine ecommerce situations where just hash tag # something you want to buy and in 1 second you get 30 competitive bids, all geotargeted by the closest location so you can save little fuel costs to make a “greener” purchase.
Just when you think the internet is going to be dead, some entrepreneur figures it out and blows up!
Best, Tim