After prolonged pressure to earn revenues, Twitter has made a decision to show ads to site visitors to twitter.com, but who aren’t users. Twitter said the test will begin with select advertisers in the U.S., U.K., Japan and Australia, with plans to expand geographically in the future. Over the three months ending September 30, the total monthly active users, including those accessing Twitter via feature phones, grew 11% to 320 million, from 316 million in the previous quarter, missing forecasts. The first Promoted Tweet tests will be desktop only and will appear in two places: profile pages and Tweet detail pages (when you see a single Tweet on the page). Twitter COO Adam Bain said in the company’s latest earnings call in October that these tweets will monetize at half the rate of traditional Twitter ads.
Advertisement
Twitter is just testing this new ad-serving method for now, but it could more than double Twitter’s base of monetizable users.
The microblogging website’s new format will result in tweets being sorted by relevance instead of in reverse chronological order.
“In a clever fashion, Twitter is now able to display ads in a search environment – something Facebook has yet to do”, Chilton Capital Management economist Samuel Rines said via email.
Think you see enough ads on Twitter already? It’s doing a decent job with advertising on its site to logged-in users, so why not make an effort to reach non-active and not-logged in users?
Twitter has defended its user base, which is about a fifth the size of Facebook’s, by saying that its content is more broadly distributed to non-members through news sites, television and Google. Promoted Tweets. Previously, Promoted Tweets were tweets that advertisers could purchase to market their products through, as they tried to reach Twitter’s audience of logged in users.
According to the company, the majority of its logged-out users are visiting on desktop rather than mobile devices.
Advertisement
Twitter’s reach first expanded in mid-May, when the company announced that U.S. users searching in English will see relevant tweets in their mobile Twitter search results. Eventually, it will also show ads on the logged-out homepage. Depending on how successful the beta test is, this could be a way for third-party developers to further monetize apps that use Twitter’s Fabric offering.
