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Twitter Copy Google Online Advertising Model

Twitter has announced that it will launch its own online advertising platform later this year which will resemble Google AdWords.

Although Twitter managed to turn a profit last year from completing lucrative search deals with both Microsoft and Google, investors and analysts have been waiting a long time to see how the micro-blogging social network planned to make its business model sustainable in the long term.

Twitter revenues were further bolstered last week when Yahoo! made a similar search deal to Google and Microsoft’s deals. However, for Twitter to remain a free service, then some form of advertising seemed inevitable.

The problem for Twitter was always going to be how to integrate advertising naturally into a service which thrives on being short, concise and unadulterated. Copying Google, Twitter plans to implement ads into its search results, based on keywords which will generate relevant adverts. A search for “beach” might bring up a list of adverts from companies selling holidays for example.

Crucially, Twitter is restricting adverts at this stage to its search function, which means that users who don’t search on Twitter won’t have their Twitterstreams interrupted by advertising. Whilst this initially might limit the reach of Twitter’s advertising, it’s a compromise which will allow Twitter to maintain its online integrity whilst still generating revenue.

Adverts will be in Twitter’s standard format, no longer than 140 characters and distributed via a third party software. The potential spanner in the works is that Twitter search lacks the finesse of Google’s algorithm, and hence getting properly targeted ads which are relevant to the keyword searches could be problematic for Twitter.

Online Advertising news posted by Frank Hudson on 02 March 2010

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