Twitter Denies Third Party In-Stream Adverts

25 May 2010 by Graham Lyons - News advertising, twitter 1 Comment »

For a long time now Twitter owners have been looking for a way to make money from their massive success. Much in the same way as YouTube, Twitter has created a popular platform with bags of potential but no profitable end result so far. Of course Twitter recently set about putting an end to this commercial drought with the implementation of in-stream advertising. However with a selection of other companies vying for this space alongside Twitters own service ‘Promoted Tweets,’ Twitter has dented these companies’ aspirations by making in-stream advertising exclusively their own.

After all, why shouldn’t they? To allow other companies with experience in developing such advertising services to integrate with their system could marginalise their own service. Somewhat ironically, with experienced companies such as Ad.ly and Twad.ly vying for advertising space on Twitter, it is Twitter themselves who are the rank outsider with little commercial experience to date.

As a result of Twitter’s decision, many of these companies are understandably steamed at being left out in the cold. However, Twitter also made several good arguments via their blog explaining why they’ve made this partial u-turn.

Self-Preservation

The Twitter platform works and they certainly don’t want to do anything to harm that. They’ve spent a lot of time developing a unique platform and want to preserve that. Third-party advertising certainly wouldn’t have Twitter's wellbeing in mind, nor the user experience for that matter. As a result it’s likely that third party advertising would threaten the integrity of the site through basically just wanting to make a quick buck. By controlling their own advertising, Twitter can more fluidly integrate it with their current platform.

Innovation

Every web company wants to move forward and develop into something even better. Twitter certainly has innovation in mind and not simply short-term monetisation. As such, their Promoted Tweets service will play a part in gauging user’s preferences and keep Twitter evolving.

Bearing the Costs

The fact is that irrelevant of other services being third party, Twitter is still the host platform and will bear the brunt of the maintenance and spam control. While they might turn a small profit provided by these third-parties, would this small profit be worth the maintenance required to keep things ticking over.

What it all seems to boil down to is that Twitter want to maintain the integrity of their platform and allowing third-party advertisers to plunder it, would potentially do too much damage to be worth the risk. By monitoring their own service they can reap the rewards while still ensuring that their site moves in the right direction and keeps user experience at a premium. If this leaves a few advertising companies out in the cold, then it’s their own fault for basing their whole business model on another company’s platform.