Twitter unveiled a plan Tuesday to use advertising to turn its massive popularity into profit. Biz Stone, one of the three co-founders of the micro-blogging service, provided details of the long-awaited revenue-generating plan for the San Francisco-based start-up in a post on the Twitter blog.
Stone said the advertising service, called "Promoted Tweets," will allow businesses and organisations to highlight their 140-character-or-less messages known as "tweets" to a wider group of users. He said a number of companies, including Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks, and Virgin America, had signed up to take part in the first phase of the advertising program.
Stone acknowledged Twitter has been slow to add a money-making aspect to the service, which has seen explosive growth since its launch nearly four years ago and has received tens of millions of dollars in venture capital funding. "Over the years, we've resisted introducing a traditional Web advertising model because we wanted to optimise for value before profit," Stone said. "Stubborn insistence on a slow and thoughtful approach to magnetisation - one which puts users first, amplifies existing value, and generates profit has frustrated some Twitter watchers," he admitted.
Stone said "tweets" sponsored by advertisers would be featured at the top of Twitter.com's search results pages so they would not get lost in the constant stream of messages that flow into the accounts of Twitter users. Only one "promoted tweet" would be displayed per page. A sponsored "tweet" from Starbucks, for example, would appear at the top of a search results page for a user who searches for Starbucks or a related word.
"Promoted Tweets will be clearly labelled as 'promoted' when an advertiser is paying," Stone said. "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."
He said "Promoted Tweets" would need to "resonate with users" to remain anchored at the top of a page. Stone said that "Promoted Tweets" would only appear for the moment in search results on the official Twitter.com website or in the accounts of Twitter users who are signed up to receive updates from a particular company or organisation. Eventually, however, they will be allowed to be shown in the many applications for using Twitter made by outside software developers.
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