Twitter Testing Ad Platform

Twitter, the micro-blogging service is testing its Ad platform that might be launched in a few months. The good news is that Twitter will finally start making money on its own. However, on the flipside, would these ads appear scattered all over Twitter and annoy the users? To this, Twitter said when it launches an ad platform, it will make it "explicitly clear that a sponsor paid for the ad", and make it "relevant and useful". These ads will appear as Twitter messages with hashtag in update as a temporary "workaround" and Twitter says its engineering team is still working on better idea.

This information comes directly from Anamitra Banerji, head of product management and monetization at Twitter as aresponse to MediaPost's query at IAB Annual Leadership Meeting in Carlsbad, California. Banerji declined to give out a specific launch date/period and said, "we are working on an ad platform, but it's only in the test phase."

In few months, when Twitter will start rolling out ad platform, it obviously would be in phases - one region at a time. Apparently, Banerji takes a stand to prove that Twitter is not a website but a platform. Further, he added, "We don't really control the ads or the way the tweets are viewed and then consumed. We are completely open around other people innovating around us. Ultimately, publishers should have choice. But the one area of concern for us -- and that's if bad ads get identified in Twitter -- it's a problem for us in the long term. So, we should do whatever we can to encourage positive behavior."

Badly written ads may come on Twitter but would be corrected over a period of time. More relevant and region specific ads is what everyone would expect to put and see at the same time. With a vast popularity and strong user base, Twitter would certainly like to make the best of both. Apparently, this news comes right after Facebook's tie up withPayPal which clearly indicates that Facebook-Twitter users should get ready for some ad-spiced updates.

Founded in 2006, Twitter is one of the popular social networks focused on micro-blogging that has been surprising everyone with no annoying banner or text ads. At the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting Panel, Banerji showed a graph with total number of Twitter updates and spikes during the Super Bowl. It was just an example of user behavior with brands (and events?) across the site. Twitter is fed with 50 million updates per day as per recent reports.