Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Will Twitter Roll Out an Advertising Platform?

Twitter’s long-awaited advertising platform was the subject of much speculation among bloggers on Tuesday. Twitter will roll out an official advertising platform, likely within the next month or so, one of the company’s executives told an advertising-industry conference, according to a report in Media Post.

Declining to confirm exactly when Twitter would release the platform, Anamitra Banerji, head of product management and monetization at Twitter, told MediaPost ...that "we are working on an ad platform, but it's only in the test phase." When asked how it would work, Banerji says it will be "explicitly clear that a sponsor paid for the ad," and it will be "relevant and useful, so the user doesn’t think of it as an ad."

As reported on tuesday, the company says they receive and distribute about 50 million tweets a day,, or about 600 Tweets every second, reaching a popularity almost as high as Facebook. With that kind of growth, it makes sense that the company would want to take advantage of that user base and provide advertisers with a way to reach and target them. What remains to be seen is how the service implements ads, and whether or not users revolt against the commercialization of their social network.