Making Twitter Profitable
Just this morning, the New York Times announced Twitter is rolling out a new advertising program today, April 13th, called Promoted Tweets; Huffington Post has a summary. The program sounds similar to Google AdWords, in that advertisers pay a certain amount for keywords, so that when they are searched for as trending topics by Twitter users, they appear as promoted tweets. The 10 initial advertisers slated to roll out today include Starbucks, Best Buy, Virgin America, Bravo, Red Bull, and Sony Pictures. This new model also appears to be a CPM model, with advertisers charged per thousand impressions, thought the press release states that Twitter hopes to change the pricing model in the future to something a bit more complex, based on how users interact with the ad (forward it, comment on it, etc.).
So it appears that Promoted Tweets will use models that are a hybrid of those used in traditional banner advertising (per thousand impressions), Google AdWords (using keywords), and a new model that will monitor the “resonance” of the ads. Twitter needs to find a good way to make its site, one of the most popular and buzzed about on the internet, profitable. Here’s hoping that in the near future, you don’t have to be Kim Kardashian to make money with Twitter.
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