Twitter DOES Have a Business Model, After All!
All this time we’ve been using and following Twitter and thinking, “What a cool service, but how will they ever make money with it?” The company seems to have one of the most open of business models, allowing a range of companies to come up with their own clients and interfaces for reading and delivering Tweets and interfacing with their APIs.
Today, on the Twitter blog, co-founder Biz Stone finally addressed the first phase of the issue of how the company is going to monetize tweets and generate revenue with a new program called “Promoted Tweets.” They are paid-for placement of Tweets on Twitter.com search pages, one at the top of each search page, and will be clearly labeled as a “Promoted” result.
“…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. Promoted Tweets will also retain all the functionality of a regular Tweet including replying, Retweeting, and favoriting,” said Stone. “Since all Promoted Tweets are organic Tweets, there is not a single ‘ad’ in our Promoted Tweets platform that isn’t already an organic part of Twitter.”
The goal is to make the Promoted tweets as current and relevant as possible, so that they blend natively into users’ Twitter streams and don’t stick out and call attention to themselves conspicuously like so many other online ads do.
Some of the initial sponsors signed up for the trial run include Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks, and Virgin America.
Source: Twitter Blog
