Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Twitter to launch advertising platform

Today, MediaPost.com reported that the much anticipated Twitter advertising platform will be launching in about a month. This announcement comes less than six months after Twitter raised $100mm at a rumored $1bn valuation.

I’m wondering what types of ads might accompany aplusk’s insights (aplusk is Ashton Kutcher’s handle, folks). Somebody notify the makers of ShamWow.

Most of what is twat (okay, tweeted) into the tweetosphere is probably mindless garbage, but Twitter will soon be turning such waste into cold hard twash. On Monday, Twitter posted a compelling graphic on the company’s blog that illustrates the explosion in tweets per day. The company is currently running at 50mm tweets per day. According to an October study, the average twitter has 42 followers. It’s difficult to put a number on the advertising opportunity, but just for fun:


It will be interesting to see what advertisers will pay for. Even if a mere fraction of tweets can be monetized Twitter can very quickly turn a tidy profit.

1 comment:

Osahon Akpata said...

In Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner was told, “if you build it, they will come” and that is precisely what Twitter has done, built it, a large online community who send out short messages. Google built it, to a point where they have hundreds of millions of people each day asking it a question. Today they make billions of dollars in advertising revenue, based on the community they have built. Where Twitter has an advantage is in its content, utter garbage to some, but the truth about how people view products to the astute brand manager. With the acquisition of seach.twitter.com in 2008, Twitter is in a great position to capitalize on internet advertising, customizing the displays to things that particular customers have tweeted about. It is also the perfect model for advertising hot deals on products or sweepstakes, in a fast, inexpensive, short message. What could be more genius?