Twitter will introduce advertising
Last week I speculated that the new Twitter’s native Retweet feature was about search, but it looks like maybe I was wrong; it a may be all about advertising, with search playing a supporting role. Robert Scoble says that at today’s TechCrunch Real Time Crunchup, Dick Costolo – Twitter’s COO, said that Twitter will introduce an advertising model. Scoble speculates that this will be done through metadata. He believes the metadata would be revealed when you mouse over a given tweet. I think that the metadata will be used to instantly generate an advertisement and it will be the ad that is revealed when you mouse over the tweet not the metadata.
The metadata
Your digital camera captures metadata every time you take a picture. In many picture viewers you can see the metadata when you mouse over a picture or when you look at the properties of the picture. Similarly, metadata is currently being captured every time you tweet and this could be easily expanded to capture more data about your tweet.
This metadata could include:
- Geolocation
- Time
- Application
- Reach
- Influence of tweeter
- Retweet rank
- etc.
How it works
While Scoble says this could be used to deliver personalized advertising to the originator of the tweet, I say it could be used to deliver targeted advertising to anyone interested in the content of the tweet, and search would help to deliver these tweets to interested parties.
An advertising model could be introduced that instantly generates: “undertweet advertising”
Say I tweet, “I think the Droid will pose significant competition to iPhone [and link]”.
My tweet could be targeted for advertising based on the included metadata and the content of my tweet. When someone mouses over the tweet they would see a link that says “Use this code for 25% off Droid at Verizon” or even a video about the Droid.
The advertiser could simply set criteria for keywords (used in the tweet), location, sentiment (love, hate, rocks, sucks, etc.), reach (based on the size of the network), users influence, etc. and when the criteria are matched the “undertweet advertisement’ is instantly placed.
So what does this have to do with Retweet?
Twitters native RT feature allows original RT to be passed along with its metadata, and the old system would assign a new set of metadata for each RT and this would ruin the advertising model. This is why I suspect that while search may be part of the reason, advertising may be the main reason.
Costolo says this is advertising that we will love; I am not so sure. What do you think about all this? Let me know here or tweet me @andrewmueller.
Hmm, interesting concept. I still question Twitter’s motivation at monetizing their website vs. monetizing the network in general, but perhaps they could enable third-party apps to implement this same advertising platform and allow them to take a cut of the profits for all ad views on their apps. Now that would be intriguing for the entire network.
John,
I hope this is exactly what they will do – enable the ecosystem to benefit from the advertising model without detracting from usability. I guess we will soon find out.
Fascinating and plausible.
You’re right. It’s just too big a risk to introduce something as disruptive (and community-insensitive) as the DUM-RT button without the prospect of some massive payoff at the other end. Monetization in some form would be the leading candidate, and being able to piggyback targeted ads on specific RT threads would definitely be worth some coin to some people….
I agree Dennis
I’d be inclined to think that there must be something like this behind the DUM-RT although I wonder about the meta data. Twitter certainly doesn’t seem to care too much about meta data associated with replies (except in their DUM-Reply). I’d think that there would be value in being able to capture the whole conversation around replies with multiple parties involved, but this is effectively thwarted by their change to dumb down replies.
The consistent theme to their changes to me seems to have more with controlling server capacity (I speculate with no insight only garnered from watching from the outside).
Sooner or later they need to monetize something, or this whole thing has to go bust. What that is, and how to do it without alienating the (diverse & fractious) user base I don’t really know. I guess because we’re not paying for anything (at least directly) we don’t get to choose.
In closing though, I do wish they’d get the meta data management act together. I’m sure it would make the service better and would allow “hot” conversations to be identified, shared, browsed, heck even enjoyed, and subsequently monetized.
cheers, Andrew
Thanks Andrew,
You are correct that they need to monetize and we all need them to do so or we have no Twitter. So the challenge is how to do so without sacrificing usability; heck maybe even adding to usability in certain use cases. I use twitter a lot for conversation and so do others in my network. I wonder if we are outliers (I don’t think so) or typical users.
I look forward to see what they introduce.
Andrew
Gawd you’re smart. Great thoughts, A. Methinks you’re on to something!
Shelly,
You’re the best!
Andrew
Good point about the repeat payload possibility for the new RTs, but of course Twitter would still likely want to put ads with tweets even if they’ve not been RT’d yet.
So both ways would be fine, really the genius is simply that Twitter would be adding ads that would be unobtrusive (require an action from you, a form of raising your hand that you’re interested), therefore less annoying and less likely to be ignored, and therefore ultimately a game changer in on-line ads.
I explained more on how I see it playing out here: http://bit.ly/7ijJmH
Also a lot more comments on Scoble’s original post, that my post links to. Overall, I think it can be a good thing, assuming good, reasonable execution by Twitter of course.
And therein may lie the rub: After the relative disaster with the “New Retweets”, I’m not sure how confident I am…
Here’s the deal: We don’t pay anything for Twitter. It’s free. So how does Twitter maintain this service? Ah! They sell advertising. Servers cost real money. Bandwidth costs even more. They have to do something to pay for these things. They’re not a government agency. They need a business model to survive. An old Chinese proverb says if you live under someone else’s roof you must bow your head. Well, if you don’t want to bow your head, don’t live in Twitter’s birdhouse.
Andrew,
I love how your always in the trenches bringing us out to think about the ramifications of each change that is made to this platform. I feel twitter is counting on people using this functionality to much. With about half of all active users utilizing managers, it becomes irrelevant to me. In addition to that is the fact that they have taken too long to develop a model around this, the tribe is too accustomed and conditioned to not having an environment like this that it will just become even noisier (by the way I hate mouseover popups, extremely annoying IMHO) . I don’t care how targeted the ad is, trying to pull of semantic search inside of a conversationally based network is foolish.
Why don’t they just set up a realtime search engine that they advertise or just lease the data to people building semantic search right now. Or Put a google adwords column on the page (which most people are already conditioned/accustomed to in numerous other sites) This would really just be a speed bump to most users..if they want to target users by context. Its very easy to conduct metadata about what they tweet about and pull the google ads in that way. I think they actually believe there site is invincible…kinda comical.
Thanks for being a community Leader Andrew…Alex
Alex, thanks for your thoughtful comment,
I am glad that you like my commentary on the changes to the Twitter platform. Actually it does already affect each and every one of us regardless of whether we use Twitter.com, a twitter client, or web app. I believe it affects the decisions that Twitter makes and the new RT feature is one of them. The fact that RT’s that use the new RT feature do not show up in the clients and probably will not unless the client uses the web feature affects us all. This means the ability to easily see the reach of our tweets in the client of choice is diminished and we must check twitter’s own RT feature to see if we have been RT’d using this feature. It is a pain in the butt. If I am correct and this was done to facilitate their advertising model, we are all being affected by it.
I think they will use traditional ad models such as adwords etc in associated with search results but think the new model when revealed will be something that would be passed on through to the clients and web apps.
It is possible that Twitter could force the client to serve the adds but limiting API calls unless they comply. I hope it doesn’t come to this, but is altogether possible. I am concerned that all this disruption to the twitter ecosystem is a deterrent to developers and will affect their decisions to work in the platform. This too will affect us all. I also agree with your feelings that they believe their site (and service) is invincible (or irreplaceable) and yes it is comical, and Sad too!
Given that those of us who use 3rd party apps like TweetDeck aren’t affected by the Twitter RT changes, will this make any difference unless/until these apps do the same?
Yes, no RTs’ that use the new feature on twitter.com currently show up in the clients, and it is likely that they won’t unless the client implements the new feature. It is a divisive move that fights for mindshare.