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Twitter: Easing Us into Advertising?
I'm an early riser thanks to my 16 month old daughter. Our normal ritual is to walk down to our local Starbucks. On the way, I try and catch up on the day's e-mail, Twitter and my other social networking activity. This morning, a tweet from friend, Kyle Flaherty, caught my eye. It said
"I just noticed the advertising on the top of Twitter pages, subtle"
Because I normally look at Twitter via desktop client, Twhirl, or on the mobile iPhone site, I didn't immediately notice this change. I remedied that by switching over to "standard" mode and marveling at the unobtrusive little banner at the top of the page that said "Election 2008" and then listed a few keywords to the left of it (see below circled in red)
This banner got me thinking about business models for Twitter. Here's what my thought process looked like:
- Wow, Twitter may actually be able to make some money. Granted, the audience number is still relatively low (somewhere in the 2-3 million range) but it's a smart, well-connected influencer crowd.
- Starting with the "Election 2008" non-advertising campaign was a nice way to ease people into the advertising model without creating a major backlash.
- I wonder how much impact desktop clients like Twhirl, Snitter, Twitterific along with the mobile apps like Twitterberry and Twinkle will have this advertising model. My guess is that Twitter can force folks like Loic LeMeur to pull the ads throw via the API or threaten to shut it down. If the clients are willing to pull the ads threw, is there a rev/share that goes on?
Obviously there will be much more to come on this front so stay tuned. Interestingly, there hasn't been much talk in the blogosphere about the "Election 2008" banner/functionality being a stepping stone to an advertising model. TechCrunch sees it as a way to build out groups functiionality, perhaps for enterprise use. In a quick scan of the top blogs, only my friend Jennifer Leggio aka Mediaphyter hints at the ad revenue model on her ZDNet Blog.
What do you think?
Fri, Sep 26 2008
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 I think firstly that I was wrong...it's not advertising...yet. But I think this is where you are going to see some simple sponsorship, perhaps similar to what Pandora does for large campaigns. The issue becomes how do you transfer this over to the desktop apps that most people use?But not sure they need to worry about that just yet, since although I use TweetDeck 99% of the time, I do check Twitter.com at least a few times a day to view a new follower or someone mentioned by one of the people I'm currently following (whew, that's a lot of "follow").And then your third bullet is dead on, there will have to be a rev/share that happens OR I wouldn't be surprised to see Twitter go out and buy up one of the more popular desktop apps and own the whole thing./kffwww.engageinpr.com
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